The Shinra Interviews
by Synthesis
Summary: "Tell me what you did for Shinra." In the years after Meteorfall, Yuffie Kisaragi plays journalist and secures an interview with an elderly former employee of the company, who's willing to talk on one condition.
1. The Interview

_**Preamble: **_

_This entire story is in a format very unlike my usual work, as should be immediately obvious. If I consider expanding on the concept, I'll probably fall back on more my more conventional style of prose, but I thought I would try something different, and this was a convenient opportunity to do so. Otherwise, it's all my predictable standbys: vaguely original characters, unreliable narrators, unseen bureaucracy, disaffected but polite military careerists, the usual. _

* * *

**Interviewee: **Go head, Ms. Yuffie Kisaragi.

**Kisaragi: **Before we begin, and I'm keeping my promise, would you mind introducing yourself? For the recording.

**Interviewee: **You mean 'for the record'?

**Kisaragi: **Huh?

**Interviewee: **Never mind, it doesn't matter. My name…my name is Victor Io, spelled I-O. I was born on the ninth of May, 1945, in what today is called old Junon.

**Kisaragi: **And what did you do, Mr. Io?

**Io: **Victor is fine. Or Io. Whichever you prefer, anyway, I…was a professional military careerist. I mean, I was a soldier and then a commissioned officer in the First Wutai War. [PAUSE] Do you mind if I?

**K: **Go ahead. Mr. Io is lighting a cigarette.

**I: **You're new to journalism, I take it?

**K: **What do you mean?

**I: **Never mind. Anyway, the First Wutai War, or the Midgar-Wutai War. It's also sometimes called the Continental War or the Hundred Years War. This was the war that went on for decades before you were born, that ended in 1975. I remember because I turned thirty shortly after Wutai left the continent. The war…forgive me, I'm going to presume you're not familiar with this…ended with the ejection of the Wutaian Empire from the Eastern Continent and the Liberation of Junon. In the process, the political order here, in the East, collapsed. Countries like Junon, the Duchy of Kalm, pretty much every state in what was called the Midgar Confederation collapsed. [PAUSE] You see, that was the reason for the political ascendancy of the Shinra Corporation and…

**K: **What's wrong?

**I: **I'm sorry, I'm getting very off-topic.

**K: **No, it's fine!

**I: **No, I'm rambling. Anyway, I was second lieutenant in the Grand Army of Midgar, before it was disbanded. Afterwards, which is probably what you're more interested in, I was commissioned officer in the reformed Midgar Army, when it formally became part of the Peace Preservation Force, under Shinra's Public Safety Division. That was around the time New Midgar…well, Midgar…was being built. Eventually I became captain of the Presidential Guard.

**K: **So you were an employee of the Shinra Company?

**I: **Yes, same as everyone else in this neighborhood. Which, I suppose, brings me to the point promised.

**K: **Go ahead.

**I: **You aren't the first journalist who's asked for this interview. And I'm not offended. But I would like to say something, for the record: the Shinra Corporation, or the Shinra Electric Power Company, or Shinra Incorporated, or whatever we'll call them, was not evil. A corporation is a legal and bureaucratic invention. It is not a person. It's not capable of being good or evil. It can only exist through the efforts of people, individuals, who can be evil, or corrupt, or ambitious.

**K: **Which people at Shinra, at the company, were?

**I: **Very many were, of course. Obviously, you didn't need to tell you that. I knew many of them over the course of my career, especially as Captain of the Guard. [PAUSE] That's really all I insist on saying. I'm sorry if I sound defensive.

**K: **That sounded pretty rehearsed, actually.

**I: **You can guess why. Please, ask any questions you had.

**K: **Actually, it does sound like a good place to start.

**I: **How so?

**K: **Could I ask you how you feel about the collapse of Shinra, the company I mean?

**I: **The collapse of the Shinra Corporation. [LAUGHTER] Not to put too fine a point on it, Ms. Kisaragi, but I assume you're referring the successful insurrection against the corporation in Midgar by the group AVALANCHE?

**K: **Yeah, I…guess I am.

**I: **Do you mind?

**K: **Mr. Io is putting out his cigarette.

**I: **You really don't need to narrate like that. [PAUSE] But yes, I'll answer your question: it's probably best that it happened when it did, and not earlier.

**K: **Really? I mean, really?

**I: **That answer surprises you? I could see how it'd be surprising coming from me. But I was born before the original founding of Shinra's corporation, after all. I'm not a scientist or an ecologist, but even the S.E.P.C. publically communicated that Mako energy was a finite, exhaustible resource for electricity generation. People knew it wouldn't last forever, which was why more had to be found. Always more. The same was true about the manufacture of materia. Sooner or later, we'd be in an environmental crisis. [PAUSE] Before the city's destruction, I lived in Midgar for almost thirty years. You may not believe it, but it's certainly long enough to witness firsthand the extraction impact of this substance, this…'lifestream' as it's called now…by the corporation, in flora and fauna. Even knowing that Midgar's air quality had little or nothing to do with the eight Mako Reactors and everything to do with the city itself, there's a compelling argument that we were approaching a crisis point regarding energy production and resource extraction. [PAUSE] I'm sorry, but you're giving me that look again. Is any of this making sense?

**K: **Sorry, but you said something earlier. [PAUSE] Before I asked you if you really felt that way. If I rewind and playback the tape, you know…

**I: **That it was probably for the best that it happened when it did?

**K: **Yes, that. "And not earlier," you said.

**I: **Well, if it had happened earlier…sorry, I don't completely understand the question?

**K: **What if it had happened earlier?

**I: **Well, the…the Sephiroth Crisis happening when it did. Of course, the military bore some responsibility for Sephiroth's desertion and rampage in the first place. There was a military operation, called the 'Great Sephiroth Plan'…

**K: **When Shinra destroyed Sephiroth's barrier around the Northern Crater.

**I: **I'm surprised you'd know that.

**K: **[LAUGHTER] You'd probably be surprised what by what I know, gra-...sir.

**I: **I suppose that's possible, Ms. Kisaragi. [PAUSE] But it was a blessing of sorts that the insurrection…that AVALANCHE, I should say, succeeded when it did. Not just for environmental reasons, or even because of Sephiroth. If the first AVALANCHE Insurrection had succeeded in Calendar Year 3, I suppose…

**K: **Suppose what?

**I: **I can only commented on what I knew in my capacity as a commissioned officer in the Peace Preservation.

**K: **What does that even mean?

**I: **Not a great deal, admittedly.

**K: **Could you just answer the question?

**I: **Apologies, I didn't mean to frustrate you. I suppose that, if the first AVALANCHE Insurrection after the war had succeeded, we'd all be dead, because that was AVALANCHE's goal in the first place. Years before either Sephiroth or the Northern Crater. [PAUSE] I'm sorry, I've said something to offend you.

**K: **[LAUGHTER] What? No! I'm just…surprised, that's all. It sounds like a heck of a story.

**I: **I suppose it is. But don't take my word for it, you could just read those books on the shelf behind me. A few decades of incomplete corporate records, but the details are there. I like to think of it as my severance package when I left the corporation. [LAUGHTER]

**K: **I was meaning to ask, where did you get all those books?

**I: **There's no harm in telling you. The military archives on the forty-fifth floor of the Shinra Building, 100 Central Plaza, Sector 0, Midgar City.

**K: **You just took them?

**I: **I suppose I did! It was a collaborative effort, almost half of what you see was salvaged or otherwise taken from the sixty-second floor research library, which was part of the Midgar Metropolitan Government.

**K: **The what?

**I: **The Midgar…nevermind, don't worry about it. You're free to look at any of them if you'd like.

**K: **I might do that. [PAUSE] For journalistic reasons, of course.

**I: **Oh, I'm sure.

**K: **So about this…first AVALANCHE Insurrection you mentioned? You were…?

**I: **Well, I never fought Barret Wallace's AVALANCHE. I mean, you can see it for yourself. I'm an old man now, I was an old man then too. The Midgar Military Police is…was a career for young men, even before AVALANCHE returned, between the mob, the wildlife, and everything else. But Fuhito's reign of terror was really my last actual combat campaign before becoming a glorified bodyguard for two presidents. It's probably the only reason I'm here today, that and a great deal of luck.

**K: **Fuhito? Who's Fuhito?

**I: **You don't know? No, you wouldn't, thanks to us. He was the original leader of AVALANCHE, the brilliant mind who would've killed all human life to save the Planet. The most dangerous man no one's ever heard of.

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_I've thought about writing this for more than ten years, probably closer to fifteen. As for the 'why now?', well, even before Square-Enix teasing the possibilities and potential of a modern high-definition reinterpretation of the game, I've had a lot of fun playing that twenty-year-old game on Xbox again (and the occasional frustration). Originally, the story was a bit more intimate, beginning early in the life of the now-interviewee, decades before the events of the game (when all that time was a blank slate for Square-Enix to fill). Since then, we've had the film _Advent Children_, a few short stories and a handful of video games to fill out those gaps, though not much has required embellishing. Since this is a bit experimental, I may just let this sit as it is-it's hard to say how interested people are in reading about globe-trekking Yuffie playing expose journalist and interviewing the surviving officials of the ancien regime in a post-Shinra, post-Mako Reactor age. If you do actually want to read more, be sure to let me know. _


	2. ACT I - KALM

_**Preamble:**_

_I was flattered by the unexpectedly positive response to the (comparatively) short interview transcript that proceeded this, and decided to continued. Unfortunately, that means for this to function as a story, some degree of "assembly" or "foundational explanation" is necessary. Why is Yuffie interviewing people from Shinra? When did she start? Even how? Which means, for the sake of this chapter, relying on wordy prose. I don't intend to _only _write in conventional prose, but here it's necessary (and necessarily lengthy, even after leaving much on the cutting room floor). _

* * *

**ACT I **

**KALM**

For her it started with a voicemail from Yuffie Kisaragi, Yuffie who'd always been the most eager to remain in contact with her and Cloud, whether or not she had a good reason. In the aftermath of the Deepground Revolt, and the political scandal that followed, she expected to hear from her, and the mystery ninja did not disappoint.

"_Hey, Tifa, it's me again. You know where I could find a tape recorder? A good one? Of course you do, finding things is your whole business, isn't it? I'll be in Midgar in three days, let me see, that's…_"

Even if she wasn't surprised by Yuffie herself, Tifa Lockhart was surprised by the nature of the request. Yuffie was always asking for things, harmlessly enough, it might've been what kept them in touch. But a tape recorder? It didn't sound like a very "ninja" thing to ask for.

"What does she need a tape recorder for? Something to do with Deepground, or Vincent? Has she even heard from Vincent?"

Cloud gave a very typical answer. "Probably nothing good."

"So we're going to help her?" she teased.

"Of course. It's Yuffie, isn't it?"

Yuffie arrived in Edge a day early, surprising Tifa. The regional bus network wasn't known for its swiftness or its reliability, but it was possible Yuffie resorted to some other method of travel. She didn't even know where the younger woman was coming in from. Cloud, appropriately, had started following transport news rather studiously. _Shinra wants to spend forty million gil to build a new continental railroad; proof that they can make even a good idea unpopular. _

Since she wasn't expecting Yuffie, she hadn't even bothered turning from the television when she entered, the door chiming after her. "Welcome to the Seventh Heaven."

"Hey Boobs! Slow day, huh?"

Ever since finances and convenience had made her switched back to her old look, Yuffie had taken to using an old nickname she, and only she, used for her. Back when they met in the forests outside Junon, when they were still in AVALANCHE and they were chasing Sephiroth.

Surprise was replaced by mild annoyance. Tifa forced a smile. "Yuffie, you're early!"

Naturally, Yuffie hadn't changed in the last few weeks, though her choice in clothing was new. She was same slender, diminutive round-faced girl in Tifa's mind, with the same short black-brown hair with a long black-and-white headband. But her ill-defined ninja look had been replaced with a sleeveless black sweater, a red cargo vest, and khaki shorts. _Well, she was never all that consistent anyway, was she? Except for the shorts. _

"Jealous of the vest?" she asked, as if reading Tifa's mind, while skipping to the counter.

"I've heard that one before," Tifa preempted her, offering a hand which Yuffie enthusiastically shook. Usually she could expect a hug.

She plopped into a stool, dropping her backpack. "You're really no fun, Boobs. Speaking of no fun, where's Cloud? I brought him a souvenir."

"Should be back any time now, he's doing courier work for the W.R.O. Headquarters outside of town…wait, a souvenir?"

Yuffie was already fishing something out of her kit: a large, flat photography book, the sort that were printed before Meteorfall, in lightly used condition, which she passed to Tifa over the counter.

"A Photographic History of Gold Saucer Chocobo Racing," Tifa read the title. "You're joking."

"I think he'd like it," Yuffie insisted. "I didn't steal it, I know that's what you're thinking."

"I wasn't thinking that," Tifa lied, carefully flipping the laminated cardboard cover. Yuffie gave her a wide, smug smile as she looked through the glossy pages before turning towards the television and asked about the fuss coming from the news program. "Oh, some dumb expose about an airfield outside Junon."

"Airfield?"

She closed the book. "You're in luck by the way—I found exactly what you asked for."

"Exactly?" Yuffie sounded confused as Tifa left the counter and disappeared through a door; she could hear the older woman climbing up the stairs. Looking around, Yuffie found the bar and restaurant were as slow as she had previously joked. "I'll just wait here then," she called out, turning back to the television on the wall. The 24-hour news channel who had broken the Deepground Story, T.N.N., had an investigation team outside Junon, apparently trying to make their way through a particularly obstructive chain-link fence.

Yuffie was still watching when Tifa returned, putting a large box onto the counter in front of her.

"Here you go: one professional grade field recorder." She smiled with a hint of severity. "Another gift from me and Cloud."

Yuffie stared at the box inquisitively. It was made of cardboard, and remarkably plain, except for the large, faded diamond-shaped logo of a Shinra company and bold text. Her neck bent at she read it.

"TC-5500, Portable Tape Recorder, Professional Quality Open Reel. Shinra Video and Sound Products Company." She blinked. "I guess it is," she declared, as though _it_ had been previously in doubt. Tifa rolled her eyes.

"Where'd you get this anyway, unclaimed delivery?"

The answer took a moment. "I think I took it off the _Highwind_, before Cid lost it."

"Why?"

She blushed. "Honestly, it was small and sounded valuable," she confessed.

"Tifa! I'm so proud of you, I could…" Tifa gave her a look to stop while she could. "That makes sense, Shinra equipment on a Shinra airship. Does it work?"

"I told you, it's unopened." Tifa cocked her head. "So yes, probably."

"Okay, so I'm gonna' be honest with you…I've never used a tape recorder that was bigger than my head before," she admitted.

"Try taking it out of the box first."

With surprising care, Yuffie did so, laying the box lengthwise against the counter, pulling open a cardboard flap, and revealing the protectively-wrapped contents. She took out a small metal microphone with a bundled length of cable, then a matching metal stand. Finally, she lifted the actual device out of its shaped foam packaging and set it next to the box. Tifa impatiently tore open another layer of plastic wrapping.

"Another way Shinra was killing the planet," she half-joked.

"It looks like everything's here," Yuffie muttered, looking back and forth from the included paper manually. "But it's huge," she repeated. "And not in a good way, like your…"

Tifa cut her off. "It's reel-to-reel, which means everything's recorded on the magnetic audio tape, like inside a cassette. Apparently the quality's excellent, better than a lot of modern machines," she explained, pulling out an unopened reel of recording tape, which she waved in Yuffie's face. The ninja was still consulting the paper manual, her brow furrowed.

"How do you know that?"

"My dad had one of…" Tifa paused. "My family in Nibelheim owned a home model, big one. Part of a HIFI set, they used to call them. Guess you didn't have them back in Wutai," she added with some levity.

"I guess not." Yuffie sounded worried.

"If it _is _anything like the HIFI, read the instructions," she warned her. "Don't break it even before you use it once, I could probably sell it for a few thousand gil."

"I won't, _mom_," Yuffie groaned sarcastically. With care she poked and prodded the machine, pressing down on inactive mechanical switches and feeling the angular, die-cast housing.

Tifa was tired of waiting. "Why do you need it? Seriously, why a _tape recorder_?"

Yuffie looked back at Tifa, wide-eyed, so much so that she almost regret asking the question. There was no snappy, silly comeback or attempt at a disarming joke. Instead, the ninja's eyes wandered away from hers and towards the television on the wall. The broadcast showed the news team had gotten through the fence.

In the center of the camera's view, the newswoman in the field was ecstatic. "_Can you see that? Be sure to get that!_" She addressed the audience again, while pointing at desolate landscape behind her. "_Since before Meteorfall, this whole fenced area was sealed off by the Junon Army! With their departure, we can actually get the first look the public has since the Continental War._"

They watched as she gestured around excitedly. "_This airfield…is mostly empty, unlike the Junon Airport, of course, and it looks like most of the contents have been cleared out, but…but look at this_!" She and her camera crew ran a dozen meters, equipment dragged after her, and pulled an ancient canvas tarp off of a strangely shaped, cylindrical object with flat surfaces branching out perpendicularly from the main body. "_Look at this!_"

"Look at what?" Tifa asked, as if responding.

_I'm told this was called all-metal monoplane attack aircraft!_" she cried out, as the camera adjusted itself. Under the tarp, presumably like its neighbors, was a rusting metal monoplane, its glass canopy cracked and cloudy with the years, its large radial engine and propeller blades sticking outwards. It didn't look like any plane Tifa had ever seen, including the _Tiny Broncho_. "_This machine, and thousands like it, were used first by Midgar Confederation and then the Wutaian Empire, dropping bombs from the air! Since the end of the war, the Shinra Corporation disbanded all existing military air forces and maintained a monopoly on practically all aviation. Most of the Eastern Continent's, in fact, most of the world's air travel, comes out of Junon…_"

"See what they're excited about? A hundred-year-old plane that doesn't fly?" Yuffie raised a hand and scoffed. "Cid's gonna' finish repairing the _Shera _one day, he swears it."

Tifa almost laughed. "He sure does."

"Not to mention Shinra still has a _thousand _of those damn helicopters."

"Don't remind me."

"_And _they repossessed the _Highwind_."

"You wanna' do that?" Tifa asked skeptically, returning to the subject. "Search for old…airfields?"

A man on the news team was trying to climb up some footholds in the side of the fuselage towards the cockpit, only to slip and almost fall. "Not _exactly _that."

"Because it looks like a really glamorous job."

"Tell me about it." Yuffie turned back to the TC-5500, now holding the unused reel of tape in her hand, as if trying to picture how one actually loaded it into the machine for use without the benefit of a cassette. Tifa watched her move it back and forth around the machine, before managing to open the transparent shutter cover over the reel spindles themselves. _Well, this is different. _

Yuffie finally broke her silence. "What was the Deepground?"

"Sorry?"

"What was it, really? How did it start?"

Tifa had no idea and she continued. "The story goes that it was the failed medical division for Shinra's SOLDIER Corps. That there were human experiments, that there was revolt, and that Shinra cut their losses and cut them off under Midgar. They didn't surface until Meteor destroyed the city." Yuffie's frown grew. "How did we even come to that point? How did nobody know it was coming? Were they all dead?"

Tifa tried not to look helpless. "I…I don't know."

"Don't feel bad, I don't think anyone knew. Or almost anyone. If there were hundreds of ex-SOLDIERs underneath Midgar, you don't think someone at Shinra would've, I dunno', used them to fight Sephiroth or something? Or us? But that never happened, did it?"

Yuffie looked back at the television broadcast, having now returned to T.N.N.'s studio to discuss the importance of a few rusting aircraft sitting abandoned outside Junon.

"What else don't we know about it? What if the next time, it's not just a bunch of stupid junk airplanes abandoned in a field? What if it's the next Deepground?"

"Or the next Jenova?"

Tifa had been so engrossed in Yuffie's explanation that she hadn't heard the door open: standing there was Cloud Strife, closing the glass door after him, an empty courier bag draped over his unarmored shoulder. Tifa heaved a sigh of relief as Yuffie jumped out of her seat to give Cloud an awkward half-hug while laughing.

"Sorry I'm late," Cloud announced politely as Yuffie unnecessarily dragged him over to the counter.

"How long were you listening there?" Tifa asked suspiciously.

Cloud looked at Yuffie. "Is that really where the Deepground came from? According to Shelke?"

Yuffie took a moment to answer. "When she was here last, the Worldwide Network wasn't completely accessible. Or hadn't been restored, I don't really know which. But last I heard from her, yes, that's the gist of it." Tifa's face looked unconvinced and she shared her sentiment. "How did they even find Jenova in the first place?"

Cloud considered it carefully. "Shinra's research expedition into the Northern Crater. It's the same story that you would've heard." His head tilted a little, blond hair shifting, before removing his goggles and courier bag. "Or maybe not."

"Cloud?"

He looked at Yuffie directly, leading her to twitch slightly. "I think it's a good idea, or at least a good place to start. Deepground shouldn't have happened, we shouldn't have let it come to that point. I don't know anything about the Worldwide Network, or half of what Vincent might know, but Vincent chose his own way."

"You can't really blame him," Tifa added quickly, getting a glance from Yuffie.

"I don't," Cloud amended his statement as he sat down. "Everyone involved has their reasons."

He paused. "Or they're dead," he corrected himself. "But you've seen the news," he said, gesturing at the television on the wall.

Yuffie gave a sigh and an exaggerated shrug at Tifa.

"If there is another Deepground, or even another Jenova Project, somewhere, there's a _very _obvious lead where you should start—with the Shinra." He stood up from the counter and approached the television, reaching for the volume keys. "Reeve—I spoke to him—couldn't say much due to 'sensitive information', but he did say that Shinra plans to permanently seal off what's left of the Central Pillar and everything in or on it."

"Which would mean the Shinra Building and whatever's left of the Deepground bunker," Yuffie added.

Raising the volume, they could hear four T.N.N. personalities engaged in a debate on in a public affairs forum: half saying that the Shinra Corporation shouldn't be allowed to do anything in Midgar, in spite of the reality that they did almost everything in Midgar at present, and half that if the W.R.O. was incapable of doing anything in Midgar, as they seemed to be, something had to be done for public safety.

"They've been talking about it since they put up the Meteorfall Monument. After Deepground was defeated, now they're actually capable of doing it, apparently."

"Shinra's been busy," Tifa announced distastefully.

"Shinra's always been busy," Cloud announced. "Our mistake was thinking that with Sephiroth, they didn't matter. After I...fell into the Lifestream, they launched their war against Sephiroth, or probably before that. After Rufus…_supposedly _died in Midgar, they moved the whole government to Junon. We discounted them too often, us and Reeve."

Tifa looked at Yuffie and was surprised to see her blushing a little. Cloud sighed in resignation. "Though I suppose without Shinra, Reeve wouldn't have a job."

"It's…it's not as bad as all that, Cloud. History isn't repeating itself. Even Barret…"

To her surprise, Cloud interrupted her. "You should start with them. Talk to Rufus."

Tifa blinked. There was a rumor, a ridiculous one she thought, that Rufus Shinra had actually met with Yuffie in person, at least once, before what passed as his return to public life when Kadaj kidnapped him during the Jenova Reunion. Tifa couldn't really fathom why, but Yuffie had never done anything to leave her suspicious of her intent. Cloud was right: Reeve Tuesti wouldn't have a job, the leadership of the W.R.O., without Rufus Shinra's personal intervention, and admitted as much. Barret Wallace, never one to forget the past, worked alongside ex-Shinra employees every day as part of the W.R.O.'s oil industry campaign. But Yuffie, the ninja from Wutai, had never had any meaningful link to Shinra that she knew of.

"I'd rather not," Yuffie muttered in response. Tifa felt some relief. "Man, I _really _rather not."

Tifa gave a sympathetic smile when Yuffie turned to her. "But…I bet he'd talk. Not on tape, but I gotta' start somewhere. Maybe he likes to brag."

"Would he?" Cloud gave a discreet shrug. Tifa wasn't sure what Rufus Shinra liked. There had been a few attempts to reach out to Cloud since Kadaj, regarding the condition of Geostigma, all of them fruitless. Cloud had met him once, and that was it. Tifa thought he might try again during the Deepground Revolt but he hadn't.

"I can't say anything about him that doesn't just make him a copy of the last President Shinra," she confessed. "And I don't know anything about him either."

Yuffie gave a helpless shrug. "I have to start somewhere."

"And you know where to find him," Cloud reminded her. That was no longer a secret, at least. "But most importantly, if you actually are able to find people from Shinra who're willing to talk, Rufus'll find out. So you might as well try and get ahead of him then."

Yuffie nodded in agreement. "You're right. I'll start with Rufus. Even if I can't get any sort of lead from him, at least I can really annoy him." Cloud almost laughed at that, and the three of them returned the large open reel tape recorder and its accessories to the box.

"So, Yuffie Kisaragi, globetrotting journalist," Tifa teased her. "You'll give anything a try, won't you?"

"Why do you think I joined you in the first place, Boobs?" Yuffie countered, grinning.

"To rob us," Cloud answered after making sure the cardboard box was securely shut.

"Just for that, I don't think I'll be interviewing _you_," Yuffie retaliated. "You just wait, before you know it I'll have a program that puts those talking heads on the television to shame."

"Oh, I'm definitely looking forward to that," Tifa jibbed. "What'll you call it? So I can look it up, first thing?"

Yuffie cocked her head. "How about the Yuffie Kisaragi Interviews…Cloud, what's with that look?"

Cloud presented her with the large box, which was heavier than she expected. "Well, then it sounds like you're the one being interviewed."

"So what, then? The Shinra Interviews?"

"It's not the best name, but it works, I guess."

Yuffie sighed. "Why am I even asking you, Spikey-Headed Jerk?" She erupted into laughter at her own nickname before soliciting another hug from Cloud and a particularly long one from Tifa, who tried to laugh with her.

Yuffie Kisaragi, she thought, the White Rose of Wutai, the conqueror of evil, and the champion of the earth and sky. And, apparently, someone Rufus Shinra would be willing to talk to. Tifa couldn't say why.

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_Wordy, wordy prose. And no interview in this chapter, hence, no transcript. But aside from wanting to have Cloud and Tifa (particularly Tifa) present in at least one chapter, this chapter does do a few things to set where we are in the (new) Calendar Year 11 (or just the old year of 2011). You may've already deduced my difficulties with how to reconcile the tone of the story with some of the more outlandish elements of _Dirge of Cerberus_, core to the Yuffie Kisaragi story, but occasionally contradiction previous story events (on top of...let's say, differences of artistic opinion?). I don't want to think about how the entire army that was Deepground went unnoticed for a decade (or more) underneath the biggest city in the world, and survived its destruction, and I don't want to take the stated intent behind Deepground, particularly the sheer villainous impracticality and absurdity, and extrapolate that into Shinra's own history. But I don't want to wholly write it out either. So hopefully you'll appreciate the judgments I've made, for the sake the story. If you do, or don't, I hope you'll let me know as always, and thanks for reading. _


	3. The Human Spirit

**_Preamble:_**

_Once again I am flattered by the positive response to this story, upon seeing it shared on Tumblr. It's incredibly encouraging, thank you! _

* * *

**The Human Spirit. **The only way for someone like Yuffie to reach the Healen Lodge, she was certain, was to follow what was left of the old Midgar-Kalm Highway past its terminus and continue in the direction of Chocobo Bill's famous ranch. Partway through the Green Valley, a winding road cut by unseen trucks took her south to the Mythril Mountains, up to the uncreatively-named Cliff Forest. The rocky scenery, she'd heard, had been a nature preserve by the Grand Duchy of Kalm, when that kingdom still existed. Even today, there cliffs were eerily empty, devoid of landmarks beyond the hardy cliff oaks, trickling pools of ground water that ran through from the higher-elevation rivers on the other side of the mountain range, and a few unassuming aluminum-sided buildings.

That had been the Kalm Cliff Resort when Shinra built it sometime before she was born. At some point, the holiday resort became a full-time sanatorium for well-off denizens of Midgar's plates, who suffered from the sake illnesses as the slums but had the money to do something about it besides emigrate. After Meteorfall, Shinra's Science and Research Department set up an emergency relief camp for corporate employees. Then something had else happened, and the sanatorium had switched hands within Shinra. Apparently, all but the worse cases of Geostigma were sent back to their hometowns, Kalm or Junon. By the time Cloud Strife was summoned by Rufus Shinra, he described the whole facility as practically deserted.

It was a lot less deserted now.

An obnoxiously loud, low-flying twin-engine helicopter made its presence known as it passed over while she was traversing the narrow steel-girder bridge and back onto the winding road. It was still audible a few minutes later she reached the outermost security fence that wrapped around the tiered cliff face, with a lone sentry standing outside a tiny excuse for a guard shack neatly cut into the rock. During the day, the only thing that stood out from the checkpoint was the dark red, almost scarlet uniform of the sentry and the similarly colored military flag adjoining the metal gate.

Bringing her off-road scooter to a halt, Yuffie leaned over the handlebars and gave the armed sentry a practiced, unkind look. "Yuffie Kisaragi. I'm here to see your boss. Call them, they'll know me."

The young sentry gave her a suitably skeptical frown before reaching for the telephone inside his shack, so she kept staring at him: that long, double-breasted greatcoat made of wool gabardine dyed dark red, practically scarlet, worn over navy blue riding breeches and leather jackboots and under a leather Sam Browne belt. A matching flat-topped _kepi _with a dark brown plastic visor and a small silver diamond cockade pinned to it. Brown shoulder straps and metal rank insignia sewn into the coat's folded collar, identifying him as a 2nd lieutenant, near the bottom of officer hierarchy in Midgar's army. All details that had stuck with her from her childhood, when a chunk of her education in Wutai had one clear purpose: to prepare her for the next war against the foreign invaders from the East, whatever they called themselves. Midgar. Junon. Shinra. Before she'd ever stepped foot on the Eastern Continent, she'd learn more than she ever wanted to about _the enemy _in the war that never happened.

The sentry turned back to her and gave an unconvinced nod before letting her pass through. The rough ride up the trail to the resort's main building took her pass more and more soldiers, almost all in the same uniform, preoccupied with some task or another. At the end of the trail, most seemed fixated on a pair of off-road military cars with their hoods raised. Some others were standing in a circle, smoking, when one replaced his cap and broke off from the group, walking in the direction of another one of the largely-identical unmarked cylindrical buildings that made up the resort. The helicopter could be heard, but not seen. One was waiting by a stairway leading to what she knew was the high-security area. Unlike the sentry at the gate, this one was older and missing his assault rifle, instead only having a holstered pistol and a baton on his belt. His rank insignia showed he was a captain.

"Ms. Kisaragi, if you'll follow me." He had an unmistakable Midgar accent. _Barret could probably tell me where in Midgar if he were here. _Then again, if Barret were here she expected he'd punch the captain in the face. That was probably giving him too little credit though, AVALANCHE had disbanded three years ago. Dropping the kickstand, she climbed off her bike before pulling large travel bag with a single shoulder strap over and standing still, arms behind her head and a grin on her face.

The captain looked skeptically at her luggage but said nothing before turning. "I don't want you guys touching it," she announced to no-one in particular before following him up the steps. He gave no response, only stopping at the end of the stairway a door which he slowly opened with a metal keycard hanging on a lanyard. "Where's your boss?" she asked after the door's locking mechanism beeped.

"The president will be with you shortly," he promised in a tone of voice that made it clear he didn't want to speak with her any more than necessary. Inside the round, air-conditioned room, with its hardwood floors, paneled walls, and blinds drawn, she leered at him.

"Have we met before?"

To her surprise, the captain visibly stopped and turned to face her. In the dim indoor light, she studied his face: a combination of age, twice as old as her at least, and hard-living, beaten by time. He might've been ten years younger than he looked, but severe, grey-blue eyes looking out from the shadow of his visor cap made it difficult to say for certain. _They all look like that, _she surmised. All like damaged goods.

"Once, at least. During your first visit here, I believe."

Yuffie's brown eyes widened. "Huh. Can't say that I remember."

"I imagine you wouldn't. That's the thing about military uniforms," he told her as he closed the door behind her with another beep. The relatively large circular chamber had been informally bifurcated with one half serving as a sitting room, where the captain stiffly stopped by a closed door only to stare at her. She was still waiting for him to finish his statement when a much larger, younger man entered, a short giant compared to her in a black-blue suit and a white blouse.

Once in the room, Rude of the Turks seemed to locked eyes with the captain who, to Yuffie's surprise, saluted, hand to the cap's visor, before leaving and shutting the door after him. She gave an unimpressed look before letting herself fall back against the beige paneled wall, arms crossed. Next to her, a large, framed standard was fixed to the wall: a red diamond with a section missing, two stylized _kanji_, and the words **Shin-Ra Electric Power Company **below.

_Never an introduction. _"What's with the railway company staff?"

Rude, now standing close enough to envelope her in his shadow, raised an eyebrow though immediately lowered it. Yuffie speculated on his thoughts: _Actually, back in Midgar, Shinra ran all the railways, and all their employees wore the same uniforms. _

He confirmed as much, his sunglasses flashing at her briefly. "The military's taking on normal patrol duties when we're busy," he answered, surprising her.

"Busy with what?" she pressed.

As expected, Rude gave no indication of even hearing the question, but gestured with a large open palm at her luggage, which she dutifully pulled over her shoulder. "Go ahead, it _isn't_ a bomb, if I was gonna' kill your boss, you wouldn't know. I'm a _ninja_, or did you forget?"

She'd hope to coax some reaction out of Rude in the process, but instead he easily picked up the traveling case for the TC-5500, undid the metal snaps, and glanced at the hardware inside. "It's a tape recorder. You know, you talk into the mic and it writes it onto plastic tape, like magic?"

"If she were intending to clandestinely record our conversation, I don't think the W.R.O.'s spymaster would use a stereo tape recorder designed before she was born to do it," a prim, precise voice announced from the opposite end of the sitting room. Emerging out of the shadows around a corner, with one hand leaning on polished wooden cane and in a white three-piece suit, wobbled Rufus Shinra. The world's richest man came to a stop near the middle of the room and stood up to his full height, easing off the cane. Rude was already bringing a chair over from the other side of the room.

"How's the leg?"

"Better in the summer," he told her in that off-handed, unconcerned tone that made distinguishing between truth and fiction pointless. He followed her eyes to his cane, which he held up, revealing the polished silver head. "It beats a wheelchair though."

"You must be getting older," she taunted him.

"We should all be so fortunate," Rufus replied, sitting on the chair Rude had brought.

The public record said Rufus was born in 1982, making him almost a decade older than Yuffie. In fact, when he'd first appeared to the public on television, she swore that he was younger than Cloud, whom she had met not much earlier. _Getting blown up probably hasn't helped with that._

Passing his cane off to Rude, Rufus placed his pale hands on his long, white slacks. "It's been a while, hasn't it, Yuffie Kisaragi?"

A large, toothy grin returned to Yuffie's face and she flopped onto the light-colored couch in front of the corporate standard. "Has it? 'Thing is, I've been busy."

"I'm sure you have. What can I do for the W.R.O.'s top spy, or are you here on more…academic business?" he asked sarcastically, his own blue eyes drifting towards the tape recorder.

In her conversations with the head of the company that bore his family name, Yuffie had always found that it was impossible not to hear the tone of obliging busyness interrupted for her. She originally found it endearing, than infuriating. Now she just thought it was strange. _If you want something from Rufus Shinra, you need to just ask him. _"The Organization is doing fine without me. By the way, Reeve sends his greetings."

Rufus gave one of his polite, closed-mouth laughs that went on a second too long to seem sincere. As the last head of the Shinra's Department of Urban Development, Reeve had worked for Rufus for the entirety of his presidency, or at least, his presidency in Midgar. She didn't think the two men had met since the day Rufus was supposed to have died, but she didn't rule out the possibility.

_After all, Rufus visited Reeve's mother before she passed away. _"So, I'm working on a personal project."

"And I take it you either want permission to interview me, or my employees or…formal employees," Rufus concluded quickly. Yuffie tried to hide her dismay. "That's something of an area of expertise for you, after all," he explained, rising to his feet and keeping Rude back with a gesture.

She wanted to reply, but instead cocked her head unhappily to one side. "Really, the giveaway is in this," he said, waddling over to her luggage at the foot of the couch where Rude had left it. "A TC-5500—a rather specific piece of equipment for a rather specific purpose."

He turned back to her. "And I doubt you've become a deejay."

Yuffie imitated his sarcastic laugh.

"So when you ask for an unspecified favor, what you're actually wanting is an interview with, among others presumably, the head of the Shinra Corporation." With his right hand, he reached forward and pressed down on one unpowered switch which a satisfying, mechanical _click_. Rufus looked up at the ceiling. "But what about? I doubt you're that interested in how my knees are after almost two years in a wheelchair."

"Maybe I want to just know you personally. 'Who is Rufus Shinra?'" She was rewarded by a mild look of surprise as Rufus glanced at her as she kicked her legs up and down like a child.

"The man who never bleeds nor cries." He flipped the leather case's led shut over the recorder and slowly returned back to his chair. "Seeing how you've seen me do both, you probably know everything there is to know about the man called Rufus Shinra. No, nothing so impractical as that."

Yuffie laughed again, either at the lie or the attempt at self-effacing modesty. They both wondered which. "How're Cloud and Tifa?"

The laughter stopped, and Yuffie pouted before answering. "The same. Bar business in Edge is slowing down, maybe because of the redevelopment, or people just leaving in general, but the courier business has been taking off. Tifa has started taking some of the deliveries."

"That's good." There were traces of serious and sincerity in that. Rude shifted awkwardly.

"Barret, well…you know Barret." Rufus gave a nod. "Cid's busy with the air fleet."

"And Vincent Valentine has chosen to…keep to himself." Rufus rested his back in the chair. "We do keep tabs on everyone formerly at General Affairs, even if they left thirty years ago."

He gave an unexpected sigh. "Deepground is still on our minds, as it should be. Another part of Shinra's legacy to the Planet during the Mako Age. That's what you've come for, haven't you?"

_There's probably no point trying to keep anything from him. Not anything to do with his company, anyway. _Instead, she responded with another question. "You know how T.N.N. broke the Deepground story before the Kalm and Edge kidnappings started? How did that happen?"

Rufus glanced up at Rude, then at the tape recorder, as if posing an inquiry. Yuffie ignored it and continued waiting. "You know we've tried to do our due diligence with the free media, especially after our own news affiliate disbanded during Meteorfall. _Responsible _freedom of information is our official policy position. As a favor to the press, certain details regarding the Midgar Central Pillar and alleged locales below Sector Zero were disclosed with tactic understandings."

"Tacit understandings?" she repeated.

Rufus discreetly gestured towards Rude, who spoke. "For a time, the company was performing excavations at the Central Pillar…"

"For a time."

"Regarding the Central Pillar, yes, _for a time_," Rufus interrupted a little harshly before nodding at Rude.

"…related to the Deepground unit. This work was conducted under the highest possible secrecy due out of a concern for public safety."

"Public safety?" Yuffie intoned.

"What else would you call it? We had unfinished business," Rufus added quickly. "T.N.N.'s investigations were completely independent of our work. Coincidences like this happen more often than you might realize."

His jaw clenched briefly. "We didn't think they'd locate our excavation work. We didn't think they'd even reach the Central Pillar, much less the excavated areas, frankly. I know what you're thinking: we don't blame the press. Obviously, we underestimated them, just like we underestimated Deepground itself."

_I can't tell if he regrets it or not. _"You know, I can't tell if you actually regret it or not."

Rufus' leaned towards her in his chair. "Of course, the corporation has publicly expressed remorse over the whole affair. Not to mention the medical aid to the affected, and our work with the W.R.O.."

She anxiously leaned back at him. "You could do something to make up for what your corporation didn't _officially _mean to do."

"As president and chief executive of the Shinra Corporation, I could," he replied coolly.

"But you won't, will you? You'll just keep talking _at_ me because maybe you feel a little guilty, but more likely you just like hearing your own voice, and poor Rude here is so shy."

Rufus leaned back in his chair, face in an open sneer. It was a rarity, even for him. His posture shifted, like a cinema villain who ought to be leering with a cigarette between two fingers. But then sneer faded and that smooth, white face came to rest against one hand as he sat. "As Shinra's president, you may ask me any question you'd like. I _may_ even answer them." He tilted his head. "Off the record, of course."

She frowned. The tape recorder wasn't even plugged in, much less switched on. "You mean 'off the recording'," she corrected him. For a moment Rufus's eyes nearly rolled, but he just twitched instead.

"Where were all the people who knew about Deep-…" she began.

Loudly enough to almost make her jump from the couch, Rufus cleared his throat multiple times. "I think we're done here, Rude."

The Turk stirred slightly. "Yes sir."

Yuffie was on her feet, fist clenched, read to hurl an objection when Rufus put a hand out in front of her. "Don't I have another item on my agenda this afternoon?"

"Uh…" Under his sunglasses, Rude might've looked stumped at the question.

"That's right, I do." He turned back to her. "This meeting, between myself and a visiting representative of the W.R.O., has finished. That leaves me speaking with Yuffie Kisaragi, civilian and private citizen from Wutai."

He turned again. "Isn't that correct, Rude?"

"Yes, Mr. President," he answered while returning his cane to him.

"I would've liked to have a longer conversation with Yuffie Kisaragi from Wutai," Rufus explained, a strange, even disconcerting wistfulness in his voice. "It was unfortunate, what with her schedule, we didn't speak long before she left through that unlocked door behind me."

Yuffie's eyes flickered at the other metal door, then back at Rufus, both hands propped up his cane between his slender legs. It was evident he was waiting on her now. "Are you waiting for something like 'If it isn't my favorite member of AVALANCHE, Yuffie Kisaragi, Master Ninja'?" he asked impatiently.

"I liked that last part," she mumbled with a smirk. "I used to call you the Shinra _heir apparent_. I remember you hated that," she remembered.

"Only because it was technically incorrect. You and I never met until I'd already succeeded my predecessor," he slyly corrected her.

_Or because of President Shinra's other sons_. "So, before I left through that door, did I have a chance to actually ask you a meaningful question?" She expected the sneer to come back, but instead Rufus stared at her with those cold blue eyes, their hostility dialed down moderately, beckoning her to continue. "Why? Why do they keep coming back?"

The world's richest man smiled at her, a smile so fatherly she wouldn't have believed him capable of it. "Because what Shinra is, is the human spirit. In good and in ill. You know what we are, you, I, Rude over there? We're the orphaned children of neglectful parents. So we raised ourselves by manipulating the physical world to our whims."

Yuffie stared back at him, visibly perplexed. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, Rufus burst into loud laughter, almost causing her to jump again. He continued laughing, his shoulders rocking in his chair, before settling down to a smile.

"People need to work. More accurately, they need food, they need shelter, they need medical attention, as I'm very familiar with. All those things cost money. Despite the copious amount of funding I've given them, the World Regenesis Organization—they should've listened to me and avoided that terrible name—has not attempted to particularly change that arrangement. They could institute some model of universal income, or even just print their own currency, but they've done neither. And they're not particularly proficient at employing people…beyond very capable scientists and their paramilitary forces, of course."

Yuffie felt herself blush. Rufus gestured at the framed company standard hanging over the couch. "You see that?"

She frowned. "It looks like any other Shinra Company logo." Though they were notably absent from Healen Lodge itself, even today, you could find them all over the ruins Midgar, fading with time at an inadequate pace, of the same design or some minute variation.

"You're right. That particular one hung from the wall at the Junon Main Office, it was donated by our…representatives there, in the city government, sometime after the fall of Midgar." He looked back at Yuffie, now making a particularly distasteful face. "Tell me, have you ever wondered why on that logotype, and so many others, my surname is most prominently written in _your _language?"

Yuffie returned her face to normal and stared at the framed logo. "Actually, I have." Though he hadn't said as much, Rufus was referred to _Wutaian_—though really, it was academic knowledge that Wutai hadn't invented the language, but co-opted it from a neighboring country they had conquered more than a thousand years ago. "And why your old man had a Wutaian name."

Rufus smiled. "Maybe one day I'll tell you in an interview."

"You and Hojo."

His smile faded. "Yes, myself and Professor Hojo."

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_This chapter, until not long before it was published, was going to be nearly twice as long (namely, it would feature the second half of Yuffie's visit to Healen Lodge-these notes might not be for readers who're shunning chapter previews or very mild spoilers, apologies for that). That would've put it more in the style of my other major works, where the average chapter runs around 10k words, excluding notes. I think I've done both myself and the audience of a favor for making the cut, and if anyone_ _is _actually_ eager for it, it won't be that long before the next update. _

_To this day, I have not seen a detailed "normal" (in other words, non-super-deformed/chibi world model) sketch of the red-coated Shinra military officer/police/railway employee, despite being one of the most visible NPCs in the whole of _Final Fantasy VII. _On top of that, unlike the Shinra infantry (who had battle models), they have yet to appear to any modern sequel. It's pretty infuriating and actually leaves me to suspect Square-Enix might just silently "retcon" the design out of the game. They are absent from the remake demo footage thusfar, despite being the first enemies subdued by AVALANCHE upon their arrival in Sector 1. So I get to guess what they look like (based on 20th century military dress)._

_The relationship between Rufus and Yuffie is something entirely important that I really didn't anticipate being. Shinra's titular head, of course, is very fun to write, more so than Cloud at least. In the original concept, Rufus was a character of some importance, and Yuffie maybe not even that, but the notion of them and their relationship is really owed to _Dirge of Cerberus _in what is maybe one of that video game's less silly revelations. Rufus speaks of the "Mako Age", as something that has (appropriately) passed, a pretty obvious reference to our Atomic or Nuclear Age (though there is no formal consensus as to whether or not, as of 2019, we still live that era or not). __And I'd like to explore the use of Japanese, versus English, within the setting, from the Shinra logotype to the massive Kanji on the side of each of Midgar's eight reactors, but I might be getting ahead of myself here. In any case, please let me know your thoughts and thanks for reading!_


	4. SOLDIER

**_Preamble:_**

_As noted in the previous chapter, this was cut from 'The Human Spirit' in the interests of organization and time. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with the two style of prose we've seen so far. Hopefully it's not so jarring as to make it not worth the trouble. _

* * *

**SOLDIER. **With the carefully trained eyes of the tallest Turk following her every move, Yuffie had exited through the unlocked steel door teased by Rufus Shinra, which took her into the small, unattended galley that seemed to serve the circular room they'd just used. Instinct steered her towards one of the two other doors, which led outside and onto a covered footbridge that linked that building with the adjacent one on the other side of a precipitous drop, this one built in the same style but rectangular and more discreetly reaching into the rocky cliffs below it. She pictured Rufus having to hobble across the varnished wooden beams with his cane. _Maybe he makes Rude carry him_, she thought, as she found herself grinning again. She could feel him watching her smirk with his quiet suspicion, but he said nothing: instead, one of his arms appeared through the door's frame holding something.

"Don't forget your antique." She felt her grin vanish as she hastily rushed through the galley and took her the tape recorder's carrying case back, throwing it over one shoulder in a huff before snapping back. Rude unceremoniously shut the door in her frowning face.

_So, the company's keeping them with him at all times now. Ever since his little talk with Kadaj._

At the end of the bridge was an identical metal door, which she opened and through it was surprised to see not another moderately modern art deco-style resort building, but a sparse, utilitarian junction room with a pair of elevator doors on one side and a particularly resilient-looking security door on another. She'd seen the top of the building from the outside, and surmised the elevators must've reached into the cliffs below. She'd never been in this part of the resort.

To her side, one of the elevators chirped a tone and the doors opened, lighting up the room. A slender woman, more her stature, with swept-over blond hair and the same two-piece black suit worn by Rude entered, not sharing Yuffie's surprise at the encounter. She reached out with both hands and took her luggage before Yuffie could respond, sliding it against the wall, then forced Yuffie's arms up in what was a familiar routine for both women.

"So, you're here too, Elena!" Yuffie announced jovially. "So, what, only one Turk with the big man in charge ever since his little talk with Kadaj?"

"Is that something the W.R.O's spymaster discovered?" Elena asked coldly as she felt the pockets in Yuffie's vest as she frisked her. The search was particularly thorough, even ignoring her luggage. When Elena circled back in front of her, she found Yuffie was grinning almost impossibly wide.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were enjoying this."

"How long have you been sitting on that one?" she asked.

"Pretty long time," Yuffie admitted frankly. "How was it?"

"Probably would've worked better on my sister. She didn't have a known crush on another Turk," Elena explained, matching her frankness.

Yuffie nodded. "Where is she? Dead?" She winced a little.

"No, she's just not posted here."

Yuffie nodded as Elena finished the frisk. "Tell me next time she's here, right? I wanna' try it on her."

"Of course," Elena replied, as though she'd been asked to hold open a door. "This way."

"To what?"

"You'll see," she answered, a hint of playfulness entering her voice. Next to the security door, she fished some sort of plastic card out of a pocket and pressed it against the digital reader: Yuffie spotted a small image of her flash on a display as the door began to lift up on a chain assembly. Now they were in a long, relatively wide hallway lined on one side with thick glass behind raised blinds, overlooking what she thought was a large courtyard, but with a clearly militaristic bent: the irritatingly loud helicopter she'd seen earlier, or one of the same model, could be seen, landed and surrounded by multiple off-road vehicles and a small military tractor. Not just red-uniformed officers but the enlisted soldiers, in their modern dark blue military fatigues, were scurrying about, including at least a half-dozen who disembarked from the helicopter itself. In a testament to the thickness of the large windowpanes she was walking by, their racket was heavily muffled and she had no choice but to watch them yelling and gesturing at one another, particularly when a soldier wearing a massive radio set on his back climbed out of one of the cars and tried to get the attention of the helicopter's crew.

This was called, in military parlance, a landing zone. She'd known for years that helicopters were making regular flights into Healen Lodge, but somehow she'd never actually seen it happen. _Was this deliberate? Is Rufus trying to tell me something, trying to remind me of something I know?_

She knew what it reminded her of: Shinra's occupation of Wutai.

After Wutai lost the war, when she was around ten years old, a military occupation was set up in the so-called Imperial City. "Unilateral" was a word used to describe it. Called the Midgar Army Provisional Government, it was an elaborate military government that would install Midgar's rule—now indistinguishable from Shinra's rule—over the defeated empire.

Except it didn't last. There was no wanton slaughter or brutal occupation, as everyone had told her was inevitable. Shinra didn't even build the Mako Reactor they'd publically desired, violating the ancestral holy lands outside the Imperial City, though they'd considered it briefly. Instead the entire military occupation packed up and left as quickly as it had appeared, leaving only a SOLDIER garrison at Fort Tamblin, the eastern name for _Tamburin-jō_, the Great Tamburin Castle. After a few years, that was replaced by a corporate office whose sole duty seemed to be maintenance of the long-range power and telephone transmission lines from the mainland. As it turned out, Shinra had no interest in exacting painful revenge, at least not as they expected. Shinra took Wutai's materia, the same way the Grand Army of Midgar had when Wutai fled the Eastern Continent after the last war, and poured money into the commercial, agricultural, and tourism sectors. Instead of another Mako Reactor, they go their tourist trap.

_I still don't understand why they'd do that. _Or why Rufus would care in the least about her childhood memories.

"So, journalism?" Elena's sharp, proper voice jolted her out of her childhood memories.

"Yeah," she taunted her back. "That's right. What of it?"

She could hear Elena stifling a giggle in front of her. "And I take it you didn't get that highly-coveted interview with the president of the Shinra Corporation?" she taunted her back.

"Oh, who cares about Rufus, he's old news," she insisted. "How about you? What does Elena…Elena…of the Turks, have to say?" she finally asked.

This time Elena didn't even bother stifling it as they continued along the windows.

"Come on, I'll make it worth your while. Come on, come on, come on!" she chirped.

"I seriously doubt you could," Elena finally replied, glancing at her over her shoulder briefly. "And I'm not looking for a job with the W.R.O., unfortunately for you."

"Maybe I should try with Tseng," Yuffie remarked remorsefully. With the Turk's back to her, she took the opportunity to reach into her luggage and turn the large, upwards-facing control knob into the record position. She then felt for two metallic, textured switches inside circular pits, hoping the leather case would mask the sound of loud mechanical clicks.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **Where is your old boyfriend anyway, Elena?

**Elena: **I'd remind you that he's not boyfriend, but that seems like a waste of my time. And yours, for that matter. Did you really just come here to harass the president for an interview for, what, a book? I can't even say I've ever thought of you as having read a book before.

**K: **I wouldn't say I was harassing him. [PAUSE] Hey! I read lots of books!

**E: **Besides ones that tell you how to use thirty-year-old reel-to-reel? Seriously, you look ridiculous with that thing, I hope you realize that.

**K: **Yeah. [YAWNING] Like I'm going to take advice on style from Shinra's department of hired murderers.

**E: **You should be so lucky.

**K: **So, Miss Hired Killer, where are you taking me then? And maybe remember that I'm probably the last person in the world who'd be afraid of you.

**E: **Stop complaining and look at that.

**K: **You mean that helicopter outside?

**E: **Yes, that. What do you see?

**K: **I see a bunch of your uniformed goons running around, loading equipment onto the helicopter. So what?

**E: **So even out here, on these cliffs in the middle of nowhere, the company's been busy. You're smart enough to have figured out the military presence here is at the highest it's ever been. Back in the old days, after Meteorfall, even many of the patients didn't realize this facility was operated by Shinra.

**K: **That the reason for all those company logos everywhere? Avoiding confusion of ownership under capitalism? [PAUSE] No reading, humph.

**E: **You told the president that this is about Deepground. You're right to still be worried, someone at the W.R.O. should be, instead of celebrating how you're the masters of the universe.

**K: **I…wouldn't go that far.

**E: **And we were worried about it too. We worried about it before the media or your boss Reeve, for that matter. We're still worried about it. [PAUSE] If anyone of those men out there knew about something even remotely like Deepground, trust me, we'd know about it.

**K: **Yeah, well, forgive me if I don't think that's enough! You had, what, two years to do something about Deepground? Three? How many people died while you were busying doing something, until AVALANCHE had to do something about it?

**E: **You mean like how AVALANCHE did something about Jenova's Head and Geostigma? [PAUSE] I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell like that.

**K: **Yeah, me neither. [PAUSE] Sorry.

**E: **You're right, unfortunately. We…the Turks, the company, everyone…we screwed up. Not because we weren't doing something, but because we were afraid. Like you said, we knew about the Deepground Army better than anyone, and we knew how disastrous it could be, so we were careful. And it ended up being a disaster anyway. More than half of the General Affairs Department that was committed to Deepground was injured in the fighting, some of them seriously. [PAUSE] We didn't have enough people, it's a simple as that.

**K: **And now you do? I see, at least, thirty soldiers out there right now. And I've seen more helicopters on flight paths to the resort than this.

**E: **You've been watching the skies? I'm impressed.

**K: **You know I can't just leave it to you. We…we tried that, you know? [PAUSE] You're putting your hand up against the window, what're you looking at?

**E: **My hand against the…when the president was talking to you, he wasn't telling you that there's a community of retired veterans of the Midgar and Junon armies now living just down the road, in Kalm. [PAUSE] He certainly isn't telling you that, in particular, you should seek out the former-Captain of the Presidential Guard force, who has retired in anonymity in Kalm. [PAUSE] Because sharing that with a member of the public, even if she were in the W.R.O., could jeopardize the safety of those veterans and expose them to violent anti-Shinra sentiment.

**K: **Wait, Kalm?

**E: **So you understand that...

**K: **Yes, Elena, I know what you're saying! [PAUSE] Retired veterans of the Midgar and Junon armies. I'm sure they're a real easy-going bunch.

**E: **Compared to us?

**K: **[LAUGHTER] Good point. [PAUSE] Tell Rufus thanks. Or…don't tell him. I'm not sure how that works.

**E: **Let's keep it that way. You know we're only helping you like this because we trust you.

**K: **Really? I thought it was because you watched me save Rufus Shinra's life. Same as those guys out there. While all your elite SOLDIER members and military police and guards were just standing around, useless.

**E: **Well, SOLDIER isn't what it used to be either. Deepground made sure of that.

**K: **Hey, about that. The W.R.O.'s official line is that SOLDIER was disbanded. But that was before Deepground. We know what was left of SOLDIER fought them. I guess you couldn't not give me a straight answer on that, could you?

**E: **[LAUGHTER] You waited that long to ask me that? Fine, you want an answer? See that jeep that just drove up to the helicopter? The woman in the back seat?

**K: **[PAUSE] You mean the tall, pale blonde…whoa! Look at the pair on her! I mean…I'm seeing a blond woman in a very form-fitting sleeveless and legless black combat suit, with sword on her hip and…is that a war scythe? I haven't seen one of those in ages. Way she's spinning it, geeze, that thing probably weighs more than I do. [PAUSE] That's a big materia crystal on the other end. Though not as big as two other things…

**E: **God, it's like I'm talking to an idiot savant. Stop describing everything you see!

**K: **And those bright blue eyes, it's like she's in...is she in SOLDIER? Is that what you're telling me?

**E: **What does she look like?

**K: **She looks like if Cloud and Tifa had a kid and she had her chest and his height and sunny disposition. God, I hate that smug look you Turks always have. So what's her name?

**E: **Why don't you go ask her some time? I'm sure she'd love to chat.

**K: **She's getting into the helicopter, with the lady in the white coat. [PAUSE] Is she on some kind of mission? And what summon materia is that? Whatever it is, you know that was supposed to be surrendered to the W.R.O. two years ago, right?

**E: **You mean surrendered to you, the W.R.O.'s spymaster and materia-keeper?

**K: **It's. The. Law. Elena!

**E: **I'm sorry, is a member of the former eco-terrorist insurrection AVALANCHE lecturing me about the law? You know how stupid that sounds? And don't try stealing it from her either, I've seen what she can do with that giant hammer of hers. In fact, actually, why don't you give it a try? [PAUSE] And by the way, I know you're recording with that ridiculous thing. Next time, maybe get eavesdropping hardware that isn't the size of a small child!

[STOP]

With another loud metal click, Elena turned the knob back and stopped the recording, the TC-5500's numerous mechanical parts gently coming to a halt.

"Now how did that happen?" Yuffie asked innocently as she pulled her hand out of the luggage.

"You don't think I couldn't hear those reels spinning?" Elena asked, her eyes narrowing hostilely. "Or when you started it in the first place?"

_To be honest, I thought there was an even chance you didn't. _Yuffie managed to hold that back and just gave harmless smile, sticking her teeth out. "Seriously, though, who's Boobs and how did she get that materia?"

Giving a slow, loud, and exasperated sigh, Elena let her forehead come to a rest against the thick glass pane.

"By order of the World Restoration Act, I order you to tell me," Yuffie insisted.

"Sometimes I forget how much I hate you."

"Oh, you love me and you know it," Yuffie announced smugly, a wide smile reappearing on her face. "I'll let the materia slide this time, on account of how helpful your boss has been. Or hasn't been. Whatever. Next time, though."

Head still against the pane, Elena's chestnut-colored eyes shifted towards her with a clear look that suggested she couldn't count on there being a next time. "I ought to take your stupid tape recorder, but there's a good likelihood you can't even use that thing to begin with."

"You never know, do you?" she taunted, turning back to in the direction they'd entered the hallway and strolling away from her. Yuffie was confident that she'd given an adequate impression of calm—in fact, even with her remaining questions, she wanted to get out as soon as possible. Whoever the tall, fair-skinned woman with blonde hair was, it wasn't as pressing as who'd she seen get into the helicopter after her, presumably before it lifted off. A smaller, thinner redhead with an unmistakable prosthetic arm concealed under a white laboratory coat.

Yuffie Kisaragi, the spymaster of the World Regenesis Organization, would've never imagined Shalua Rui, one of the organization's most talented minds, would reappear with the Shinra.

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_I'm not sure if switching back and forth between these two formats is such a good idea in the long run, though it does make it clear the limitations of transcript-style dialog. Still, I'm happy with how it turned out, and I think it captures a certain...narrative?...that might less creatively conveyed otherwise. Something like an interview transcript wouldn't really give us access to Yuffie's thoughts and memories (allowing us to flesh out Wutai a little further), unless she went as far as to verbalize them one by one, which there's probably a reasonable limit to. _

_I very much like the Turks, which itself probably isn't surprising. Given time, and interest, and a good justification, I would actually like to spend a little time reconciling the two different faces of them, as probably best encapsulated with Reno (the first and most prominent Turk introduced in the original game), a ruthless G-man-style enforcer and killer and a selfless hero with little sense of self-preservation (when he was saving Edge City's ungrateful children). Some people are, understandably, unhappy with that juxtaposition. What do you think? _


	5. Directory

**_Preamble: _**

_This chapter grew out of what might've just been one transition scene, ironically into the longest yet. Still, I thought it was an idea worth expanded on, and given how important Kalm is, it probably ought to feature more prominently. Hopefully it's still entertaining. _

* * *

**Directory. **Not necessarily by choice, Yuffie found herself listening to the radio, in the form of a pair of unpleasantly slow, unpleasantly relaxed but still distorted voices coming over the speakers at the front and back of the bus she was riding.

Nowadays more often than not, radios were tuned to news broadcasts, including those of T.N.N.'s radio affiliates. Apparently the Shinra Corporation or some company they owned had been responsible for practically all music broadcasts, at least in the Eastern Continent. Yuffie found "the news" tremendously boring and disliked that, though there was something uniquely unpleasant and annoying about news over radio. _I hope it's not the format. I might not be cut out for this work._

"_So you're talking about splitting the atom? Have you ever read 'A World That is Free'?_"

The other voice laughed. "_You know I have, and yes, exactly that. Goodman popularized the notion among the public, energy derived from radioactivity, though he didn't event it. He was a science fiction author, not a scientist. But we're living in a science fiction age, aren't we_?"

"_I'll have to take your word for it, but what does that have to do with the Junon Navy_?"

The bus hit a pothole or something similar in the road, and with the bounce the antenna must've been knocked free because the signal turned intelligible. Yuffie sighed.

Junon. The biggest city in the world, swelled three years ago by refugees from Midgar even before Meteorfall. Even refugees from AVALANCHE's bombing campaign. Now they had an army, a navy, and an air force, all bearing that name. _And _they were pro-Shinra. Yuffie wondered which part of that was most problematic.

_Even if I find what I'm looking for in Kalm, I'm going to end up in Junon. They might as well have come out and said that. _

Though she could've rode in herself, she'd boarded at one of the bus stops along the old highway outside Healen. It'd be a more discreet way to slip into Kalm, if there was someone expecting her.

Through the closed window, looking past the rows of tiny country cottages and farming plots, the ancient city walls of Kalm came to view, the city's flags wafting in the summer breeze: a brownish rectangle with a white outline and a heraldic circle in the middle. Looking over at her luggage, she opened the TC-5500's leather case and fished out the small metal microphone that she had finally gotten working, its stand folded out of the way, and held it in front of her mouth before pushing the power and recording switches.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **According to W.R.O. investigation into archives in Midgar, Kalm—technically Old Kalm—was destroyed by the Army Group Midgar, so obviously, Shinra. The Elm District became New Kalm, and then eventually just Kalm in the cover-up. [PAUSE] But here's where it gets interesting: those same archives suggest the Midgar Army made a mistake, and that most of the army was dissolved, whatever that means, and replaced by the army that stayed in Midgar until Meteorfall. The reason for this mistake, or who Shinra was fighting, isn't known. I was able to cross-reference it with a different file, that mentioned one name: Veld. [PAUSE] Today, the government is the Electorate of Kalm which, as far as I can tell, is basically the same thing as the Edge City Committee.

**Nearby Passenger: **[UNINTELLIGIBLE COMPLAINT]

**K: **Yeah, well, no one asked you, so beat it! [PAUSE] Rufus Shin…well, Rufus came here after Meteorfall, along with hundreds of other refugees who couldn't make it to Junon. This is where Geostigma was first identified, when it was called the Kalm Fever. The story is that after he grew tired of the death threats from the Kalmish, Rufus bankrolled the construction of Edge the company left the city, never to return.

[STOP]

Pressing the stop button and giving a final unfriendly stare in the direction of the complaining passenger, Yuffie looked back in time to see the bus cross through the open city gates into the ancient castle town. It was hard to believe that something even older had apparently been destroyed, at least mostly, by Shinra. _Despite that, the Kalmish used to be relatively pro-Shinra, since without Midgar there'd be no work or even electricity in Kalm. Everything went back to the city. Then Midgar and the Shinra brought Geostigma to the city, back when people thought it was communicable. After that, they blamed Mako Reactors for it, even though the nearest Mako Reactors were hundreds of kilometers away, destroyed with the rest of Midgar. Then after Geostigma was cured, the Deepground struck, and they blamed Shinra for that too. _

She felt her lip twist. The residents of Kalm might not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, though they might've been right about Deepground at least. "So, why would someone who was high-up in Shinra's military chose here to retire?" she asked under her breath.

It was a nice enough place. The thing about Kalm, no matter what seemed to happen to it, Kalm always managed to bounce back. Though the residents of Edge resented the suggestion that the refugee crisis and appearance of Geostigma held much comparison to the actual destruction of Midgar.

The bus dropped her off at terminal pressed up against the city walls, where the next order of business was to wait in line and present one's papers to a small kiosk by the exit. Of course, before Meteorfall, no one had ever heard of immigration documentation. You just showed up somewhere and hoped they let you in, if they stopped you at all. Now, every city in the Eastern Continent except Edge and Junon had rigorous immigration controls run by the W.R.O., the consequence of the refugee crisis and the destruction of the world's largest city.

"Next!" a voice shouted over a loudspeaker.

Adjacent to the bus terminal was a customers and immigration kiosk, operated by the associated bureau within the W.R.O.—what that meant for public was an armed official in W.R.O. grey fatigues with a red beret scowling at them to meet often-changing paperwork requirements.

Yuffie didn't care for either paperwork, nor waiting in line, and shoved her way to the front of the queue just as the clerk was shouting "Papers, please!" The clerk was about to bark a rebuke at both her and the surprised man at the front of the line when she flashed a laminated badge on a lanyard.

The clerk's expression changed immediately. "M-Miss Yuffie Kisaragi! We weren't expecting you! Let me find my superior officer…"

Propping herself up on the rail in the front of the line, she gave a shrug. "Cool it. This isn't an inspection. Not that the people behind me look very satisfied."

The clerk sputtered for a few more seconds before allowing her through the immigration checkpoint undisturbed, exempting her from the luggage check. Through the gateway: Kalm, the oldest surviving city in the East, the bedroom community of the former city of Midgar and now Edge's primary trading partner. The city that would've lynched Rufus Shinra if given the opportunity. The last member of the Federation of Midgar in its Great Patriotic War against the Wutai Empire.

"I hate history," she muttered to no one in particular. She hoped her contact in the Kalm didn't, or this was going to be a tedious task.

Since Meteorfall, Kalm boasted probably the best-kept public library across the continent, though Junon claimed its restored State Library would rival it at some point in the future. It had fallen into decay and disuse in Shinra's time, during an unfinished project to digitize it through the Worldwide Network as had been completed with every library of note on Junon. With the W.R.O.'s seizure of the Network, the plan should've continued one day, Yuffie thought. In the meantime, Reeve had strongly advocated for the preservation of the physical library, and understandably got his way.

For Kalm, there was a catch. The W.R.O. had reviewed all of the library's staff, and within a year, most of its mid-level staff were W.R.O. employees. The cynical saw this arrangement as suspicious, and they were right.

In the wake of the Deepground abductions, Reeve brought back one of his point-men from Edge. August Fitzroy was an illegitimate but traceable descendent of the last Duke of Kalm and the ruling House of Kronen. You wouldn't realize it by looking at him that, in another time, he might've been an aristocratic princeling: in his mid-twenties, he was hardnosed and never unserious, eager to learn, and absorbed information like a sponge. The Kalm Library was almost as good a place for him as Edge's underground intelligence community. She even thought, maybe, he would've made a good Turk, if he hadn't hated Shinra at the time.

"Hey Auggy, how's tricks?"

She found August in deep inside the shelves at the Kalm Library, sleeved rolled back and his blazer in one clenched fist, looking more like the midlevel mob enforcer he'd actually been before Meteorfall than a librarian. He tossed his blazer aside and took her hand to shake.

"Yuffie Kisaragi. Right on time, for once."

"A punctual mobster. Or are most mobsters punctual?" She flashed her wide grin at him. August, thin and pale but still muscular under his clothing, with fading brown hair tied in a rattail, ignored her remark in stride. It was all in good humor—August had hated the Midgar Slums Mob almost as much as he'd hated the Shinra Corporation, but it hadn't stopped him from being one of the best factfinders in the business.

"No, just me," he told her, almost smiling, as he released her hand. "What's the hell's that? A dialysis machine?"

Yuffie glanced at her TC-5500 in its carrying case and back at him. "What's everyone's obsession with my luggage? It's a big tape recorder."

"That's putting it mildly." August shrugged, as if to drop the subject. "So, how long has it been? You haven't been back since the kidnapping, have you?"

"I've been busy," she assured him, taking a seat at the empty table behind the selves. Conveniently, August seemed to have cleared this entire branch of the library out by one means or another, giving them privacy. The offspring of royalty could even violate Kalm's prohibition against indoor smoking, as he promptly demonstrated after sitting down opposite of him.

"Of that I have no doubt," he assured her. "How's Edge?"

"Still pretty miserable," she confessed. "But if Reeve says it's getting better…"

"Then it probably is." August was playing with a gold-plated cigarette lighter, opening and closing it, a nervous habit he'd picked up in from his teenage mob days. Yuffie leaned back in her chair and cocked her head. _So, is he going to ask me if I met with Rufus Shinra? Or is that beyond even his abilities. _

"So…" August began slowly. "I hope you're not here to tell me I'm being reassigned."

Yuffie let her eyes widen in surprise. What that what he thought she'd come here for? To deliver transfer orders? Though August officially worked for the Kalm Library and secretly-officially for the W.R.O., his duties did put him in the purview of Yuffie's intelligence gathering division. She studied his face: he looked even more serious than he usually did, creases on his forehead.

"No. God no. I mean, no offense August, but what good would you do in Edge compared to here in Kalm? Fact-finding guys like you are a dime a dozen in the city," she assured him quickly.

A weight seemed to be visibly lifted off his boney, muscular shoulders. "That's good. That's really good, thank you."

She frowned. "Edge isn't _that _bad. You know they've cleaned up since Bahamut. Shinra even rebuilt their Meteorfall Monument."

"You mean the Meteor Monument?"

"Yeah that." The monument, supposedly ordered by Rufus Shinra in person, was officially called the Midgar Meteorfall Monument, as indicated by the text inscription on the dais. Many understandably saw it as a silent testament of the corporation's authority in the city built from Midgar's ruins, though Rufus had never publicly said so much. After its controversial completion, somehow the belief spread that Shinra had built a monument to _Meteor _and its awesome destructive power and not a memorial to _Meteorfall_ and its victims. In Yuffie's formal opinion to Reeve, she concluded it originated from the same group of people who believed Shinra, and not Sephiroth, had summoned Meteor. _Yeah, let's rehash the stupidest political debate in the world. Why not? _

August still seemed relieved. "That's good. Really good," he repeated. "I mean, you've known about me and Kalm, my family."

Yuffie gave an overdramatic nod, implying that he didn't need to retell the embarrassing story of the illegitimate issue of the Grand Duke of Kalm, the resulting rival family branch that now represented the only known examples of surviving royal blond since the Grand Duchy's collapse. Yuffie disliked August's stories—not because he wasn't a good storyteller, he was, but because everything always seemed to come back to him. And she'd heard his tale about how the Don Asoledo, the crime boss of the Sector 4 Slums, barely held on in the face of Don Corneo's onslaught before the later's death in Wutai—with August's brilliance and cunning, of course.

August's mood seemed to improve nonetheless. "Then why come to Kalm? Surely you're needed in Edge, planning for the Junon Operation."

_Oh right, that. _Yuffie held her tongue and laughed. "Never mind Junon. There's something I needed to handle personally." She leaned towards him and gestured at him to the do the same; August gave a wary look and craned his head over. "The Kalm Directory still works, right?"

Despite his best efforts, the corner of August's mouth curled up and he gave a very controlled nod.

"I need to find someone. I don't have a name, but I do have his job history: Captain of Shinra's Presidential Guard in Midgar."

There was a glimmer in his grey-brown eyes. "And you think he's in Kalm."

"Or at least he was."

He gave a less controlled nod. "Then you came to the right place, ma'am."

The castle-like architecture of the Kalm Library included a castle-like basement underneath it, accessible through locked stairways and a dungeon-like passage. With poor lighting and air circulation in her opinion, it mostly served as storage for uncirculated volumes and unused furniture, but also housed what passed as offices for August and his tough-looking colleagues. And, crucially, the Kalm Directory.

"Right through here," he explained more loudly than before, passing a pair of library employees who gave Yuffie a courteous bow as she passed by. "It's taken a lot of work, but we've kept our promise to HQ. The Kalm Directory."

The Directory wasn't much to look at: six mostly-working surplus office computers that, like every machine that wasn't located in W.R.O. Headquarters, had clearly been taken from Midgar City before its destruction, linked together on a long table. Like tree roots, their cables ran haphazardly along the floor to a large server tower, also bearing scars from Midgar but still with working LEDs that blinked periodically. Despite Shelke's best efforts, Yuffie didn't really 'get' computers. But the claim was that the Kalm Directory was the most comprehensive, most accurate residency database in the world since Meteorfall, and possibly before. Another library employee circled around the desk, turning the computer 'terminals' on one by one, the room filling with the sound of spinning fans and hard disks.

She leaned at August. "Back in my AVALANCHE days, Tifa told me about how one of the earlier members hacked the Midgar Railway's security scanner and database, so that they could use Shinra's trains to travel to the Mako Reactors on the Sector Plates. They knew how it worked—even Shinra couldn't register every single soul in Midgar, and most people in the slums didn't have residency status. Some didn't even have work permits. So Shinra basically just tried to find things that stood out. Even then, she couldn't figure out how to beat the system every time," she explained.

August nodded. "Well, not to take Shinra's point of view, but it _is_ easier when you're only dealing with thousands of people and not millions," he offered humbly. "Come on, I can show you while we're using it."

August pulled up a rolling office chair and sat down at a terminal, opposite of another employee whose screen she couldn't see. August's was flickering but seemed dominated by a black window with a flashing cursor at the end of a few words. "Per our mandate by Reeve Tuesti, after the mass kidnappings by Deepground we built a complete residency database for the whole of Kalm, first to reunite families and then to protect them afterwards. We integrated this into both the local immigration desk and similar offices across the continent via the Worldwide Network."

"I guess Shinra left us _something _useful," the other employee joked. August laughed.

"We have access to the Kalm government's own residency records, and with that we can get an idea of dates of birth, marriage, even educational and vocational background." August seemed to enter his user name and password, because the display showed a crudely rendered lock opening before opening up another dialog box, this one with a list of options. "It's not infallible, we know that. But it's the best system of its kind in the world."

_Nice pitch._ "Well, let's hope he's in Kalm then."

"You said you didn't know his name—but he was captain of the President Shinra's bodyguard in Shinra. I doubt that's something he'd have written on his residency paperwork, but it does mean he wasn't in SOLDIER or the Turks or the military police. He was in the Midgar Army, probably an officer."

"And you can work with that?"

"It's start. Having served in the Midgar Army isn't something you'd advertise in Kalm, especially not after those vets were killed in the fires last year, but there are other ways to use the data. So if someone lies and says they worked in construction or the railway or the fire brigades, we can see through that."

"How?"

"A few different ways. Like pension checks."

Yuffie looked dumbfounded. "Wait, Shinra is still paying pensions?"

"They are in Kalm, anyway. Railway pensions ended 'bout year after Meteorfall, unfortunately for them. But Military Police and army pensions are still honored." August's fingers moved back and forth over the loud, clicky keyboard faster than Yuffie could've managed herself. "All direct deposit, all by mail. Officially, no one in Kalm has access to payment transfers over the Network except the city government."

"So you're able to track everyone sent a pension check in the mail. Can you tell the difference?"

"Now we can. Military Police pensions are bimonthly, Midgar Army pensions are monthly."

"You're joking."

"Sometimes it's that easy." With particular flourish, August struck the key marked 'RETURN' and the server tower in the corner made a new, audible whirling noise. The terminal's screen flashed a few times, then line after line of text appeared in the window, each one starting with a residency number and a recorded name.

"And this is…?"

"Every resident of Kalm identified as having received as Shinra pension in the post since the system went online."

"That's…incredible!"

"And it's automatically updated with regular data, daily. Next time something like Deepground happens in Kalm, we'll know every single person who's gone missing before their own families do." He put his hands over his head. "Think about how many lives we could've saved, families reunited. If we just had…"

"More money?" she finished for him.

August looked at her. "That would help. More money for hiring personnel, training, better equipment." He gave a determined smile. "In a few years, we could monitor every single person in Kalm. Then Edge. In a generation, we could have an intelligence-sharing agreement with almost every city in the Eastern Continent."

The smile faded from her face. "And you don't see anything wrong with that?" Yuffie asked.

He gave her a blank look. "What? You don't think it'd be worth the cost?"

"Never mind," she muttered, looking back at the screen, which was still scrolling by. "God, if anything, this is too many names."

"Well, we could start with people who're still in Kalm. Leave the rest for afterwards if we need them."

"Do that."

August typed something too fast for Yuffie to see, and the list stopped scrolling, flashed, and then a new, shorter list appeared.

"Still a lot of them."

"Yeah, I can see that. Can you narrow it down to men over forty?" He looked at her momentarily. "It's just a guess."

"Probably a safe one for the captain of President Shinra's bodyguard."

_Hopefully we're thinking of the right President Shinra. _"I don't suppose you can sort by who was getting the biggest pension, right?"

"Unfortunately, custom and law prevents us from opening everyone's mail." Yuffie couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

She cocked her head. "Do you have information on where they live? In Kalm."

"That we do have. What're you thinking?"

"Get rid of everyone living in pensioners' homes, old age homes, and hospices," she guessed. "Let's say he couldn't have stayed secret for that long."

August obeyed, and the screen changed again. "That leaves…private residences and apartments, mostly."

The list was indeed shorter. Yuffie leaned towards the terminal, and August politely shifted out of the way. "These addresses…there's wards in them, the Sunset Ward, the Wall Ward, the Elm Tree Ward…"

"Everything within the walls' technically one district, but there was eight wards."

"Can you list all these by the wards, richest to poorest?"

He glanced at her again, realization coming to his face. "You think he's living it up?"

"I know I would," she mumbled. The screen changed again. "So the ones on the button live in the slums?"

"I think the residents of the Wall Ward would resent that description, but…"

She interrupted him. "Okay, so excluding the bottom two…that's only eleven names." She frowned. "Are you excluding people who're, you know, dead?"

He raised an eyebrow. "As far as I know, yes. Why?"

"Just that the name near the…never mind. Can you print out the whole list for me?"

"Don't have a PHS?"

"Yeah, I just can never figure out how to use the camera," she grumbled as the other library employee stood up and walked in the direction of the now-noisy printer.

August smirked before his expression sobered. "So, if I'm allowed to ask…why's the W.R.O. looking for Shinra military veterans here in Kalm?" Yuffie felt her eyes widen despite herself. "This isn't something you'd need a squad of security troops for, is it, because we could call HQ…"

"No!" she blurted out louder than she meant to. "No. We're…I just need to speak to one. In person. If I can find him." She felt like she might begin to regret having asked for the Kalm Library's help at this rate.

"Is that what that antique is for?" August asked.

"If I can find him."

"I just hope you don't plan to interview me," he half-joked. "What's so important about Shinra's bodyguard?"

Yuffie gave an expression of mock disgust, which she hope hid her discomfort with his latest questions. "I saw Shalua, by the way," she said, as offhandedly as she could manage.

August's eyes bugged out. Even the other employee stopped in his tracks, papers in his hands. "What, where? Wait, with the Shinra?"

_So they do know I was at Healen Lodge. Maybe they don't know I met with Rufus himself_, she thought optimistically. "I didn't say where," she answered as cryptically as she could manage.

August's mouth shut and he blushed. Yuffie gave a deliberate cough to clear her throat and took the printout from the other employee. "You might as well know, we didn't talk. I mean, I didn't have a chance to."

"'Cause she was with the Shinra," the other employee concluded quietly.

Yuffie gave a neutral shrug. August's eyes wandered back and forth between them, like he was trying to weigh in on this himself.

Before the Battle of Midgar, before she'd found her younger sister, Shalua Rui had been a familiar and unmistakable sight at the Kalm offices, moving between there, organization's Mythril Mountain headquarters , and Edge. _You could guess it was a crush, but I doubt it. More likely, people just liked her in general. _

Then after being wounded trying to escape Deepground, she'd was treated in medical stasis aboard the _Shera. _The W.R.O. had presumed her missing-in-action after the airship was shot down over the Battle of Midgar. That had been almost a year ago.

"How did she look?" August asked, rising from the chair. He closed the door the door to the small room.

Yuffie was surprised. She'd never even considered that herself. "She was up and walking," she concluded.

"We shouldn't assume…" the other employee began. "We shouldn't assume she's defected to them."

_Defected. _That was the word. _Defected to the people who keep the lights on and the computers running. Defected to the people who pay the bills. _Yuffie kept that to herself.

"Shalua was always on the move."

_You know, I'm standing right here. You could just ask. _"You know, she told me…before Deepground surfaced, before she met Vincent…that she hated the Shinra for kidnapping her sister for SOLDIER."

A glimmer of hope appeared on the other employee's face. August's remained sullen as he turned from the door.

"But she hated AVALANCHE too, you know," she explained.

"Why?" the library employee asked, sounding more than a little surprised.

"Was it because SOLDIER took her sister, but AVALANCHE took her arm and her eye?" August speculated aloud, crossing his muscular arms in front of the door. "Was it that?"

The list in her hand, Yuffie just shrugged again. "Mighta' been."

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_Four thousand words just to establish how Yuffie found what she was looking for. The thing of it is, Master Ninja Yuffie is presumably good at finding people (she found Vincent, who didn't want to be found, and a dying Rufus, who probably did), so I hope this doesn't end up taking away from that. On the bright side, this might be the single best demonstration of Yuffie's actual role in the W.R.O. I've seen yet (it tends to be something I skipped on). One of Yuffie's original foibles, I seem to remember, was her occasional inability to keep something to herself (the video game format is also to blame for that)...she's done some growing up since then._

_More world building, filling in the gaps. Surprising, _Episode: Shinra _in_ On the Way to a Smile _elaborates on many more things than I ever did, and at least in my last reading of it, I don't feel a major pressure to try and justify or even quietly retcon certain elements for the sake of suitability or just-not-being-bonkers. At least, not like I did with _Dirge of Cerberus. _I worry that I might have beyond the appropriate amount of cynicism or lack of sympathy towards the W.R.O., but it's pretty easy to imagine such events in a cynical light when they're left rather open-ended. Remember, this is the darker side of the W.R.O., the side less occupied with building apartment blocks and more concerned with people, what they think and where they go. Had the Kalm Directory existed in Edge, _Advent Children _might not have happened. Well, that's fun to sepculate anyway. And yes, I like Shalua. We'll see more of her. _

_At the risk of sounding ungrateful, despite having half of the next chapter basically completed (maybe), I may take a break from this to give due attention to my other older works. Of course, I'm always glad for some feedback and some idea of how things are going. _


	6. Detective

**_Premable:_**

_As I previously stated, I took a 'break' to work on other stories. Unfortunately, I did not make particularly impressive progress on said other stories, and eventually I decided my time was better spent putting something out. Part of that is opportunism (I don't want people to forget this story so quickly after it began), and part of that is efficiency of effort. This chapter probably would've been easier if I'd put it out sooner, or at least shorter. _

* * *

**Detective.** As she let the Kalm Library, August had given Yuffie a cotton breathing mask to take with her. She was confused as to his motives but understood the moment she stepped through the massive wooden doors at the library's entrance: the air outside the Kalm Library was terrible, practically intolerable. Yuffie couldn't grasp why, it hadn't been an issue when she'd arrived in the city.

"Because _now_ we're downwind of the coal-fire plant." August took her on a short detour: from the Kalm Library's clock tower, it was possible to see past the city walls to the winding road that seemed to run along the famed Kalm River. Maybe twenty kilometers away, it broke off into a large, fenced complex of modern grey buildings with reddish highlights along the riverfront, with several tall towers. After a few seconds, she realized the tall towers were smokestack, and that the thick overcast was actually a heavy cloud pouring out of them that easily reached to the city.

"It only lasts hours, half a day at most, and you get used to it," August assured her. "You can see the fuel piles past the main building, on the edge of the complex.

Yuffie could feel her tears welling up in her stinging eyes; with the mask on, her coughing was minimized though. "This is terrible," she declared, as if reminding him.

August held back laughter under his mask. "Again, you get used to it. You know who built that plant? The…"

"The W.R.O.," she grumbled in unison with him.

"Kalm didn't have its own reactor, and those long-distance high-voltage transmission lines out of Midgar were the first things to be cannibalized. Not that they'd do us any good if they were still around, I've heard Edge barely has enough electricity for itself."

"Well, you're right about that," she grumbled angrily as she slung her luggage over her shoulder. She considered sharing an observation how Edge, at least, had power stations that burned diesel oil. Then she reminded herself how little good complaining to him would do. She remembered a conversation with Barret. "I saw a bunch of streams on my way up here, how do they manage the coal ash leaching into the water table?"

August stared at her. "The what leaching into the what?"

_Never mind. _"Never mind."

Despite her poor mood, August had been more helpful than she'd hoped. The printout she'd been given was sorted first by the eight different wards, then alphabetically by surname. The first of the wards was the Elm Tree Ward, supposedly Kalm's wealthiest as measured by property values.

"Barnes, Cassini, Han, Heidzig, Moon," she muttered under her mask. The remaining six were distributed across the less wealthy wards. She felt her eyes welling up with tears again groped for her motorcycle goggles in her pocket, only to realize she'd left them with her vehicle. Holding back vulgarity, she continued down the street from the library, through the increasingly thinning crowds of pedestrians, before forcing her way into the nearest building.

Rubbing the tears out of her eyes and gulping in air after pulling off the mask, she knew she was inside one of Kalm's popular coffeehouses just by the smell of roasted coffee beans before sight and sound returned to her. A fistful of paper napkins later and she felt normal enough, only hoping that no one had noticed her.

Kalm's coffeehouse culture was famed even back in Wutai, and had endured the fall of Midgar. She thought it strange, considering coffee plants didn't grow anywhere near Kalm—a few years in the W.R.O., listening to economic speeches spouted by Reeve and the other financial leaders, and she'd learned that coffee was mostly grown in the highlands of Gongaga and Junon, excluding the southern _Coffea mideela_. Kalm's climate was a little too cold and a little too wet for _Coffea gongaga_. Yuffie did't like the taste itself, though she craved the aroma.

_Midgar mostly drank tea. Maybe because of how long Wutai ruled_, she remembered_. _Staring at the printout, she could hear more talking heads on the television over the quiet din of the coffeehouse patrons. T.N.N. again, as usual. She could recognize them even without glancing at the television hanging near the ceiling on the opposite wall.

"_This is the world that Shinra wanted, that Shinra might still want: a world free of borders, free of nations. Last month, Shinra put out a formal statement advocating on the importance of the continental single-market! So we should ask ourselves—do we want what Shinra wants? Or do good fences make for good neighbors?_" a T.N.N. personality asked.

It was something about economics and politics, which when T.N.N. wasn't talking about sports or the weather, was their mainstay. To this day, Yuffie didn't understand them and she suspected most people didn't.

"_I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but aren't most of those people, you know, criminals?_" a woman's voice asked incredulously. "_Do we let criminals write government policy?_"

"_Too late for that_," an oh-so-witty co-host declared. Yuffie let out a loud, piercing laugh with the maximum amount of sarcasm she could convey, clearly audible to the other patrons for several seconds, before returning to her printout.

"_No, seriously, why isn't the W.R.O. taking leadership here?_" the newswoman chided her colleagues. "_Since the end of the Deepground Crisis it feels like Chairman Tuesti has been kicking all these political balls down the street. And now _another_ ball is in Shinra's court._"

"_It's not that simple. You want to talk recent history? Fine: first, that Shinra, as in the company, was too big to prosecute, whether people realized it or not. Don't forget, everyone assumed Rufus Shinra was dead at the time, along with Martin Heidegger and Joy Scarlet Cassini. Second, that Shinra responded to the threat of prosecution by warning they'd pull all their funding to the W.R.O., which is hardly surprising since the point was to divest Shinra from its wealth. Third, that the 'appropriate' punishment for the company was the seizure of all useful Shinra materiel, permanent or otherwise, by local authorities, excluding Mako Reactors, which is what happened anyway._"

"_Yeah, I remember the court case brought forward by the W.R.O.—you didn't have to be a Shinra sympathizer to realize it was a mockery of due process for the company's survivors._"

"_Seizure and distribution of all of Shinra's property and materiel going back to 1968?_" she asked.

"_As if. Try 1959, when Shinra was first incorporated from the Junon and Midgar arsenals. The weapons company! God, is there anyone in this studio who was alive back in 1959? Back before there was even a Shinra Electric Power Company. But of course, that's what happened anyway, didn't it? A half-century of Shinra's property, up for grabs. Too bad after Midgar fell, most of it was in Junon._"

"They're not wrong about that," Yuffie heard herself muttered under her breath. A coffeehouse patron in the adjacent table seemed to notice her, but said nothing.

"_Shinra should've moved the Gold Saucer over there to replace the cannon,_" he joked. Raucous and annoying laughter from the television followed.

"_Let's think about it seriously though. I know Reeve Tuesti. Reeve Tuesti is a good man. But even he must've realized this was the most draconian, absurd example of victor's justice since the Midgar Confederation, and Shinra and everyone else, demanded an unconditional surrender at the end of the Second Wutai War. That it wasn't about rebuilding lives, it was about getting revenge. That's right: it's the kind of thing that Shinra would've done back in the day._"

The other sounded visibly uncomfortable. "_Well, you have to consider what Midgar and Junon went through back then. Meanwhile, half of the people working at the W.R.O. worked for the Shinra Corporation before Midgar fell!_" she reminded them.

"_Half? That's being generous_."

"Does anyone mind if I change the channel?" The question came from a tall, apron-wearing barista who was reaching up to the television. He had a certain, subtle nasal tinge to his voice that August hadn't had but was commonly associated with the working-class Kalmish.

There was a murmur of agreement from the patrons, and he changed the channel to the Chocobo Races at Golden Saucer, which garnered another mumbling round of approval.

Yuffie shook her head in pity while unfolding a city map she'd taken from the bus terminal, then began looking at the erratically crisscrossing streets and alleys around the Elm Tree Ward.

"Looking for someone?"

She almost jumped out of her seat: a tall, hazel-haired barista her own age was staring down at her, a metal coffee pot in one hand and a forced smile on her face.

"Yeah," she said, as calmly as she could manage. "Uh…right. Coffee, large, with extra cream and sugar," she quickly ordered.

Instead of leaving, the barista loudly repeated her order in the direction of the counter before looking back down at her. "That's a lot of names."

She resisted the urge to cover the printout with her hand. Yuffie's fear, since she'd reached the city, was that word would get out, and her arrival would coincide with however many former Shinra Corporation employees leaving. Information leaked out of the W.R.O. like a sieve; not just Shinra, but practically every other organization of stature knew what they were doing, where and when they were doing it. Shinra, Inc., just seemed particularly successful in doing so, always a few steps ahead of the W.R.O. in what the voices in Yuffie's worst nightmares called her greatest professional failing. She forced a smile, hopefully better than the server. "Yeah. I don't suppose you recognize any of them, do you?"

"Sorry, we get our share of customers from the Elm Tree Ward, but I don't recognize any of them." She frowned instead. "That's strange, come to think of it."

_Whatever you do, don't go shouting them to your coworkers, you dumb bimbo. _Thankfully she didn't.

"Are you some kind of detective?"

Yuffie chuckled. She had more cover stories than she actually remembered, starting from her days as a mysterious ninja in the forests outside Junon. "I'm an independent journalist from Edge. We're doing some pieces on displaced people from outside the city, trying to put them in contact with distant relatives across the continent, that sort of thing," she explained smoothly.

The look of surprise from the server satisfied Yuffie, and she returned to her printout and unfolded map, the barista staring over her shoulder. "Well, if anyone would have money to spare, it'd be people living at Elm Tree," she muttered coldly.

Yuffie barely held back a sigh. "And you're sure don't recognize any of these names?"

"Hey, Jun! Jun!" she barked. Yuffie put her hands to her face as the worker behind the counter wiped his hands on his apron and circled around, peering inquisitively at Yuffie's table while she groaned in displeasure. "Any of these names look familiar to you? They're from the Elm Tee Ward."

"What're they on a list for? Tax evasion?"

"No, she's a journalist," Jun's coworker explained.

"Didn't I order a coffee?" Yuffie gently reminded both of them after lowering her hands.

"Heidzig…as in the Heidzig House? That's in the Elm Tree Ward, big three-floor townhouse. And the Cassini Family, don't they live in the Elm Tree Ward? Or they used to. I could've sworn the Cassinis were big in the town before Meteorfall," Jun elaborated, tapping a spot on the city map. "But I don't think they even live in Kalm anymore. They probably packed up and headed west."

"I've never heard of them," Jun's coworker declared.

_This is what qualifies as intelligence in the W.R.O.? We're so screwed. _

"Moon…well, there are probably a half-dozen families with that surname in Kalm…"

"What about the Heidzig House?" Yuffie interrupted him. "Where is that?"

Jun blinked and pointed on the map again. "Right there. Historic Heidzig House. Built when Shinra first came to Kalm a couple of generations ago," he bragged. "Actually, I think Shinra built the whole block of houses."

"You're such a nerd. I bet you _vote_," she mocked him.

"You take that back."

"Jun _Domino_."

Yuffie was already rooting through her vest pockets. "I'm just going to go, you've both been a _really _big help," she explained quickly, fishing out a handful of metal coins and slamming them on her table in the same swift motion that she gathered her printout and map. Three silver-colored holed coins, a larger coin in deep copper color, and the largest coin, polished silver with no hole, but a diamond-shaped emblem on the face; total of 660 gil. Before Meteorfall, it would've paid for up to a week's nights room and board in the countryside; even in the hyperinflation of the last few years, it was enough to pay for several cups of coffee in a Kalm café. _Tifa doesn't know she could've sold the reel-to-reel for twenty thousand gil with the right buyer_.

"You don't want your coffee?" one asked,

"I get all my coffee by mail-order," she assured them on her way out, slinging her luggage over her shoulder. "It's faster."

Irritation that it was, the barista's description of the Heidzig House was promising: a house, or a block of houses, built by Shinra was too good to pass up. She contained her excitement. The air had cleared almost enough to breath without a mask, much less see clearly. A narrow cobblestone street snaked up the hill, in the opposite direction of the Kalm Library from the café and past a number of respectable-looking shops with rather diverse offerings: a books and manuscripts store, a women's jeweler, antique furniture, and even a materia vendor that also sold overpriced body armor. "Guess they're chasing the successful mercenary crowd," Yuffie wondered skeptically, resisting the urge to enter the shop herself and review their stock. At the far end, the narrow street merged with a wider one. According to the map, that was the Elm Tree Ward.

Along the storefronts, a boy was running alongside a girl, both in matching middle-class school uniforms. They were probably no more than ten and didn't seem impeded by the air quality. With the minimal amount of movement, Yuffie reached out and took his shoulder with her free left hand. "Hey, kiddo," she asked, trying to match the more subtle dialect of Kalmish she'd detected in August's own speech. "Do you know where the Heidzig House is?"

The child looked inconvenienced, but not particularly irritated. "You mean the big empty house in the ward?"

Yuffie looked perplexed; she wasn't clear on if this was actually question or not, but the boy continued. "It's on the corner way past Market Street, past all the other houses. It's the empty one."

His friend looked impatient. "With a red roof."

"It's empty except for the groundskeeper," he added, wrestling his arm free from Yuffie's surprisingly strong grip.

"Yeah, him."

Yuffie released him. "Wait, groundskeeper? What groundskeeper?"

"There's an old man who visits the house take care of it." Now the boy sounded like he was lecturing her.

"'Cause no one lives there."

"Yeah, I heard that the first time," Yuffie grumbled. "And you're sure the house is empty?"

"That's what I said," he retorted.

Yuffie gave a deep sigh under her mask, then consulted the printout again. "Well that's just great. Hey, neither of you have heard of Cassini or Barnes or Moon have you…?" To little surprise, both children were long gone by the time she looked up. _Right, because that's what I would've done. _

Rather than hope for more reliable children to pass by, Yuffie compromised with herself and entered the shop in front of her to speak with the attending merchant. A local shopkeeper—especially one in business long enough to actually sell materia—would have to be a dependable source of information, she reasoned. The Heidzig House now sounded less promising, but that still left four other options even before the rest of the list.

As the door's bell rang, in the figurative space behind her eyes, she saw Tifa's smooth, pale features leering at her. _Shut up, Boobs. This is my job. Sort of._

She put on her best face, the kind reserved for the general public in more genteel places than Edge. "Uh, excuse me, could I speak to…"

"Are you with the media?" The question was posed by a large, robust-looking woman with sandy-colored hair in a pair of long braids and a flower, a very Kalmish look overall. Upon closer inspection, she wasn't much older than herself, wearing a green dirndl, a very Kalmish fashion, that was stretching under strain of her chest.

_Come on, people, get clothes that fit. It's not hard. _"Actually, I am…sort of."

"And you're from Edge?" her voice was a little nasally and unexpectedly harsh, though not necessarily on purpose.

She kept up her smile. "I'm sure my inelegant choice of clothing gave that away."

"So you're, what, an investigative reporter?"

Yuffie clenched her jaw and walked up to the wooden counter. "Three for three. You're very good."

The merchant cocked her head casually, straining her bodice further, and beckoned her closer. "You're not the first one to come. Edgers aren't really all that interested in Kalm otherwise, y'know?" She gestured with one long arm abruptly, nearly striking Yuffie in the face. "The ones that talked to papa didn't have tape recorders though."

Yuffie's face practically lit up in spite of herself. "So this is a family-owned shop. You…you wouldn't mind if I asked you a few questions?"

The woman crossed her arms over her large chest and pouted. "Would you promote the shop?"

"Sure!" she lied, already reaching into the TC-5500's large case and fishing out the microphone to demonstrate. "I'll just take a minute, I promise it'll be worth your time!"

"…fine, you can use that chair. As long as we finish before my next order pickup."

Yuffie spent the next few minutes enthusiastically thanking her while setting up the reel-to-reel on a clear spot on the counter, its microphone pointed at the merchant. The tall shopkeeper began upon seeing Yuffie enthusiastically gesture at the slow-moving reels that were visibly turning at a rate of almost ten centimeters of tape per second. She had a name, Anja, and a family legacy, the store belonging to her father, and his father, and his family, backwards in time to the founding of Kalm or even to the Ancients, though of course they had not always sold the wares at this precise location. Anja talked about that legacy, and the current condition of the marketplace, and even the broader economy of Kalm as a whole until Yuffie politely pressed the topic of the Heidzig House.

"About that," she asked skeptically. "It's just some old homes built by Shinra back after the war ended, not the last one, the one before that. Why do you care?"

"Oh, it's just routine stuff…" she assured Anja, who did not see Yuffie snap the microphone cable into the small metal jack concealed by her elbow.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **[LOUDLY] So, these city homes that were built by Shinra after the World War, let's talk about them. See, our audience is interested in historic Kalm because of all the romantic stories they grew up hearing. That neighborhood is part of it, right? Just like your shop, and all these legendary businesses! I mean, who hasn't heard of the Kalm Night Market?

**Anja: **And you're sure you got all that, everything I told you?

**K: **Yes, yes, of course I did. Trust me, my listeners are always looking for rare materia and weapons.

**A: **T'be honest, we haven't had that much materia _or _guns since Shinra fell. Though at least what stock we do have tends to go quickly.

**K: **Yeah, I can see that. So, about the neighborhood…

**A: **Ya, I don't know actually know that much about it. [PAUSE] But I know some of those particular houses are probably empty, on account of all the real estate prospecting. They're wertvoll, uber-valuable, you know?

**K: **Wertvoll means valuable. I did not know. So if they were so valuable, who did Shinra sell them too?

**A: **No one. I mean, before Meteorfall, Shinra leased them to important families in Kalm, families of executives probably or local agricultural scientists. Maybe the military.

**K: **Really, like who?

**A: **Ich weiss nicht. [SHRUG] I mean, it was called Heidzig House. Probably a family called Heidzig and for a long time. I remember hearing that name when I was a little girl, connected to Shinra, but I can't imagine they're still here after all these years. Even before Meteorfall there was no family living in that house, never mind after the riots.

**K: **The anti-refugee riots, you mean. You think they might've been chased out during those?

**A: **[INCREDULOUS CHUCKLE] Only if they didn't leave before that.

**K: **And do you recognize any of the other names at the top of this list? We…I think they were residents of the Elm Tree Ward, though necessarily in that same neighborhood.

**A: **Let me see. [PAUSE] Sure, why didn't you ask earlier? Anyone in the neighborhood should know these names, well, some of them. Barnes was in the Midgar Army, he fought in the World War way back when. And Old Man Han was the head of emergency services in Kalm, along with his sons, before the Deepground Kidnappings. I know a Moon family had an eldest son who left Kalm a few weeks before Meteorfall, part of some overseas military expedition to somewhere or another.

**K: **Wait…really? You're actually sure of all this?

**A: **I'm saying it, aren't I? My old man was a volunteer firefighter under Han. [PAUSE] Cassini I don't recognize, I don't think I've ever heard that name before actually. It's a weird name, don't think I've ever heard of that one before.

**K: **Forget it, that's plenty to start with. Now I have too many possible leads.

**A: **Hey, you've got addresses and everything…if you know all this, why are you talking to me anyway? What kind of list is this anyway, just who are you?

**K: **[LOUDLY] We better wrap up here actually, thanks you for your time, Ms. Anja, you've really been a big help.

[STOP]

With her equipment under her arm, Yuffie couldn't get out of an increasingly suspicious Anja's shop fast enough and she almost didn't notice the smog that had descended in the meantime almost requiring she pull her mask back on. She'd gone from wondering if such a Heidzig character even existed to not only confirming his connection to the Shinra Corporation at some time or another, but that Barnes, Han, and Moon were almost certainly military veterans formerly in Shinra's employ. Even if Heidzig House was empty, as seemed likely, there were other strong leads to work from.

The three-floor red-roofed townhouse stood at the corner of the narrow street branching off Marketing Street, behind what had likely been an iron gate taken down sometime after Meteorfall. Some of its neighbors, built in the similar style and with matching dimensions, looked relatively empty; Heidzig House looked thoroughly abandoned, even if it wasn't falling into disrepair. The brick walls of the bottom floor were losing a battle to creeping vines, and every visible window appeared painstakingly shut and boarded.

"They oughta' fire that groundskeeper if he actually exists," she muttered, pausing in front of the cobblestone walls that partitioned off the small grounds between the building itself and the sidewalk. They were devoid of the usual signs of human habitation: gardening tools, children's toys, even simple refuse. Nothing but nearly-overgrown grass and weeds.

Undaunted, she walked along the hidden stone path to the large front door. On the brick wall, concealed by a distinct layer of black-and-brown particulate matter deposited by rains in the direction of the power station's smokestacks, there was a smooth, even spot, which she wiped with one hand. Heidzig, a plaque declared in bold, capitalized letters underneath the soot.

"Just like the sign says. I should've just come here directly," she muttered herself.

"Because you're looking for someone."

Though she didn't jump this time, Yuffie did turn red in embarrassment at not having noticed the figure standing just around the corner of the brick house, ankle-deep in shrubbery and overgrowth. He was old, sufficiently old to be unusual in this world since Meteorfall, when women and especially men of that age were an aberration in the Midgar Region and across the eastern continent. She could tell immediately that he was older than Cid, older than her father, the two 'Old Men' in her life. Older by decades, in fact.

She recovered quickly enough. "You must be the groundskeeper." He was dressed like it, after all, even stereotypically so: thick wool overalls in faded tan-grey over a collared shirt, a thick scarf around his mouth and chin, goggles over his eyes. In his hands he held a shovel, with a broom tucked underneath his arm.

"You're looking for Heidzig," he announced, muffled by his scarf before shaking his head. "Sorry, not here."

_Heidzig, and not the Heidzigs or the Heidzig family. _That was interesting. "Actually, I was. You know what happened to them?" she asked, playing along.

She knew what answer to expect. Instead, he dodged the question. "You're from the W.R.O.," he announced. "Clearly."

_Well, that's one way not to answer. _She forced a laugh. "The neighborhood remembers them, but seems to think they've been gone for a while."

"And you'd like me to corroborate that?"

"Otherwise I can see you're really busy," She glanced at his tools, eyebrow raised.

The groundskeeper seemed to take pause. While she stifled the urge to cough, he slowly turned around and wandered around the corner of the house, so she followed him. The front of the house had been eerily empty and unattended, like more subtle scenery from the Ghost Square Resort at Gold Saucer. The yard behind Heidzig House was the opposite, overgrown and littered with all the abandoned junk she was expecting earlier: multiple abandoned bicycles, an outdoor table covered in dirt and vines, a small, ancient children's swing set turned over, two ladders that she could see immediately, what looked like streetlight removed from its moorings resting against a gardening shed with a boarded-up door. _You're not great at your job, dude._

Very deliberately, the groundskeeper dropped both instruments on the table before sitting down on it. He was taller than she'd realized, especially for his age. He pulled down his scarf to reveal he was clean-shaven, then to her surprise, produced a cigarette and a chrome-plated lighter that he began fumbling with in his clumsy wool gloves. _What, is breathing not hard enough for you as it is? _

She watched him struggle for a few minutes in silence. "You know, that's a dangerous habit at your age," she pointed out patronizingly. "Mister…"

He kept fumbling with the lighter. "I never…thought of it as _dangerous_," he confessed as he struggled. "Unhealthy, certainly, but dangerous? Coming from a fighting woman for the W.R.O. who would know danger. Could cigarettes be _half_ as dangerous as the Deepground Uprising?" he inquired smoothly. While Yuffie suppressed her own coughing, the more talkative groundskeeper had an easily discernible Midgar accent, almost cosmopolitan, that couldn't be confused with the rural twang of the Kalmish.

She wanted to see where this was going. "They are when the air quality is this bad. You know there are studies nowadays that show how smoking increases the risk of heart disease and weakens your blood vessels and lung capacity. Even at your age, you should know that."

He finally succeeded in lighting his cigarette. "But for a young woman like you, a conqueror of evil, a champion of this world, certainly a bad tobacco habit can't begin to compare to the jeopardy you've put your life into." Holding the cigarette in a bulky glove, he smiled at her with unexpectedly unstained teeth. "I'm old enough to know a great warrior when I see one," he explained oddly.

Her first instinct was self-effacing laughter, so she did, only to be interrupted by her own coughing. The old man gestured at a still-living tree towards the middle of the yard, as though the air quality were somehow better underneath it, opposite the overgrown table. She moved and her own coughing subsided quickly enough, and she continued her self-deprecating giggling.

"And how _would _you know I'm such a great warrior, old man?" she questioned him, with a cocky tilt of the head of a smile. "Just something you gain with age, unlike gardening? Because it doesn't sound _that _dangerous."

He laughed in response, the cigarette still burning in his gloved hand. "Oh, God didn't wait until I was an old man to put my life in jeopardy. God did it when I was a younger child than you. The calamity, as we knew it then, did not come from the sky. It came from the west, and it began before I was born. And I thought, surely, it would not abate until after I died," he declared grandly.

His eyes narrowed, giving him an entirely less harmless appearance. The thin, bony features of his jaw and brow came into stark relief. "It was the Empire of Wutai, and it conquered much of the known world. You'd know, as one of its heirs. Not that I'm accusing you of anything untoward."

Yuffie stared at him. "Wait, are you…you're him aren't you? You're collecting the pension, so are you Heidzig? Are you the captain of the guard?"

He was smiling now. "I was born in Junon, and I fled with its refugees the Marches when it fell to Wutai. I was conscripted into the Grand Army of Midgar as a teenager, and fought at Fort Condor, Fortress Junon, Corel, and Nibelheim. When the truce was signed, I became an officer—eventually, I served as executive officer to Simon Heidzig, the former military chief of staff the New Army of Midgar. I was at Wutai when it fell, and for my service, I remained his deputy in the Peace Preservation Force of the Corporation called 'Shinra'. I am Major Victor Io, former Captain of the Shinra Presidential Guard Battalion."

He looked at the mostly-expended cigarette and stuffed it into a pocket of his wool overalls before turning back to her, smiling. "Well then, you should come with me, young lady," he told her, less poetically. Just a few steps from his table was the backdoor into the brick house, which he quickly unlocked with a key she hadn't seen him carrying.

She paused. "If you know I'm from the W.R.O., why are you inviting me in?"

Hand on the door, he looked back at her. "Because you're Yuffie Kisaragi. And I remember seeing you save lives during the evacuation of the Shinra Building."

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_So, I committed to Victor's concluded speech for probably no better reason than whimsy. Now I'm worried about how it turned out, along with the rest of this chapter. I'm a little sorry for how long it is (this sort of length is more like my other works, which are plagued by the problem of long chapters), and can only hope it's worth reading all the way through. At least, the length gave additional opportunity for Yuffie to play both journalist and detective, as well as to make use of another charming news excerpt. Pretty disparate parts that hopefully came together successfully. You can probably infer what happens next, given how this story began in the first place (and hopefully I can capture that success again), and I hope you'll stay around to see it! _


	7. Fuhito

**_Preamble: _**

_As in earlier chapters, this chapter ended being chopped down in the interests of length. Still on the longer side, I hope it's worth the wait (since the chapter that follows will likely not be coming any time soon). I remain sincerely grateful and flattered by the promotion of this story on other websites, as before. _

* * *

**Fuhito. **After waking, Yuffie Kisaragi experienced a few unpleasant seconds of confusion. Then she remembered where she was: Kalm. The Elm Tree Ward. The master bedroom on the third floor of the abandoned Heidzig House. It all came back to her.

The first thing she saw, aside from herself in the old mirror next to a woman's wardrobe of untold age, were the stack of her notebooks and notes, some of them scribbled in her own poor handwriting, others printed in the typeface used by W.R.O. computer word processors.

She wasn't supposed to leave them out like that. It was against procedure; it might even be illegal. Even if only one other person knew she had slept for the last four hours or so in a bed she imagined belonged to Frau Heidzig, whoever she was. She looked back at the mirror and inspected herself: a thin, lithe but muscular 20-year-old woman, almost twenty anyway, almost-shoulder length black-brown hair that would be straight if she hadn't mashed it against the pillows and headboard for the last few hours. Just barely short for her age, though tall by Wutai standards.

"Taller than mom was," she said aloud. Her late mother, Kasumi, wasn't much older when she was born.

_The thing about not sleeping is that you look like you haven't been sleeping. _She turned away from the mirror and reminded herself it'd be inappropriate to show up in front of the old man in her underwear, so she hastily dressed, pulling shorts on and straightening the sleeveless sweater she'd slept in, before leaving the room and descending the stairs. She could already hear the other occupant of the building down the hall, past the sheet-draped furniture arrayed in the sitting room under a layer of dust.

Unsurprisingly, Victor Io was noisily standing in the kitchen in faded wool overalls and his sleeves rolled up, in front the stove. Groceries had been laid out along the countertops and the small round table had been set for one, though it lacked any seating. She rolled her eyes and glanced at him.

"When did you wake up?"

He looked at her over her shoulder. "I'm not sure. The thing about not being employed is that you quickly lose your sense of time, at least in precise terms. Early morning." He turned to her, showing that he was wearing an apron, and reached for the groceries. "I hope you like eggs, because I have a lot of those. Do you like eggs? I could make you _tamagoyaki_, though I don't have any ketchup."

A Wutaian grilled omelet. "Scrambled is fine," she grumbled, stopping in front of the table setting. She hoped her voice conveyed her displeasure, since he was looking away again. "Gardening isn't work?" she asked, spotting a chair in the direction of the dining room. With a sigh, she removed the sheet and dragged it through a cloud of dust to the kitchen table.

"Groundskeeping. No, not really, not when I do it." After loudly cracking his fingers, he picked up the egg, cracked it into a skillet, and neatly tossed it into the sink in a single motion, which he repeated over and over. "During the war, the long one…on the march on Junon, we ate chocobo eggs every single day, unfertilized ones. It was probably our only source of protein. They weren't considered a delicacy back then, of course, but we were the lucky ones. I don't think I ate regular eggs until after the famines." By then, the pan was filled with six small eggs, which he was rigorously scrambling.

She stood next to the table, staring at him. "Why are you cooking for me?"

"Well, you do need to eat. And while this isn't my home, strictly speaking, you're sort of my guest."

"Not to sound rude, but shouldn't you hate Wutai?"

"Why would I hate Wutai?"

"The war," she pointed out, as though it was obvious. "The long one."

"Oh, that. Well, it was a long time ago, before you were born. And the war you were alive for really didn't matter that much for those who fought in the last one, if you'll forgive me for saying so." He was already garnishing the eggs with salt and pepper by that point. A mechanical timer with a single large dial, that Yuffie hadn't taken notice of, sounded its tone. "The toast is done," he declared aloud.

Lifting the skillet with him, he opened the large oven beneath the range and, with a little difficultly, knelt down with his free hand. "Would you believe this house doesn't have an electric toaster? A toaster. They must've sold tens of millions of those since the war ended."

"Yeah, it's…ironic," Yuffie concluded, eyebrow raised.

"Butter isn't fresh, but it's been refrigerated. You like butter, right?"

Yuffie didn't answer, as he produced several piece of sliced bread skewered on a toasting fork, two of which he put on a waiting plate. The eggs, in a large, fluffy lump, joined them, and he was rooting through the bags of groceries. "Here's the butter. So, I have only one question to ask you, Ms. Yuffie Kisaragi."

He turned to her, holding the plate in one hand, his expression suddenly dour and cold. Yuffie felt her muscles tighten.

"Juice, tea, or coffee?"

_ I hate it when people do that. _She sighed, louder this time. "Water is fine."

"Oh, I wouldn't drink the water here if I could avoid it," he informed her. "How about orange juice?"

Even without answering, she found herself sitting at the small round table with a large plate of scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and a narrow, antique glass of surprisingly cold juice. Io was still scurrying around, dropping the used skillet into the sink and packing up the groceries.

"What about you?" she asked, trying to hide any possible guilt in her voice while she stared at the meal in front of her.

"Oh, I ate when I arrived this morning," he assured her. "Though we're upwind of the power station, and the air is pleasant, so I might indulge myself."

She watched him take another dining chair out from underneath its sheet, drag it to the kitchen window, and set it down. Cracking the window open about ten centimeters, he began clumsily feeling around the numerous pockets in his overalls, a gradual look of confusion coming over his worn-out face, thin, long, coming to a point with his bony chin, and two dark eyes in the recesses of deep wrinkles. He found a cigarette—after a few more tries, he produced a lighter.

"You know that's bad for you," she repeated, recounting yesterday's conversation before she'd interviewed him.

"Do you drink at all, Ms. Kisaragi? Alcohol, I mean, not juice."

"Occasionally," she lied.

"But you do so sparingly," he concluded. "Picture of fitness and health that you are."

"You smoke one cigarette a day?" she asked, disbelieving.

He lit it finally. "Now, yes. When I was conscripted, the army gave us a cigarette ration, just like a water ration, a food ration, etc. Or they tried to, anyway. That was half-a-pack a day, so I smoked half-a-pack a day." As before, he held it passively in his hands while staring out the window at the disarray of the backyard. "I was your age, younger. It helped my nerves."

_I doubt that. _"I doubt that."

He grinned briefly. "After the war, you could buy cigarettes of course, but admittedly it is a particularly obnoxious habit among those who don't. The first sixty-eight floors of the Shinra Building are nonsmoking. After it was completed, it became necessary to deal with those sort of habits."

"So you quit?"

Leaning back in the chair, he turned to her and raised his right arm.

"You've been smoking one cigarette a day for…what? Thirty years?" She knew the construction of Midgar began in the 'Seventies.

He thought about it. "Not thirty years. And not every day. Some days I'd forget, or I'd be too busy to step out of the office," he laughed, the cigarette still burning towards his fingers. "I wasn't a salaryman, you know. I was captain of President Shinra's bodyguard. It wasn't a nine-to-five job."

Yuffie kept a look of appropriate loathing on her face as she ate. _This is actually pretty good. _Io remained at his chair, staring wistfully out the cracked window and blowing the occasional puff of smoke out. He hadn't moved by the time she cleared her plate, indeed, with him faced away she thought he might've fallen asleep in that chair.

She looked back in the direction of the dining room. The dining table, in contrast with the first floor's other furnishings, was uncovered: left there from yesterday was her reel-to-reel, its microphone on its stand, and its heavy leather carrying case. _That's right, he told me I could leave it out if I wanted. No one just strolls into this place. _

And even if she did, why did she care about keeping up Victor Io's strange charade? She crammed the remaining toast into her mouth, dropped her utensils noisily onto the plate, and went to inspect her equipment. The old man and his cigarette remained by his window.

_Otherwise an official of the W.R.O. probably shouldn't be squatting in the home of a Shinra military family. "The groundskeeper said it was all right," probably won't hold up in front of a local magistrate. _She surveyed her equipment to confirm it had sat undisturbed overnight, though hardly expected Victor Io to tamper with the recordings. The tape reels were where she remembered them.

She flipped the main power switch and watched the TC-5500's colored lights come back to life. "It's still unhealthy. Especially in Kalm," she repeated.

His response was delayed. "Even just one a day?"

She nodded, tightening and losing the thumbscrew on the microphone's metal stand idly. Obediently, he crushed the cigarette in his right palm before dropping it into the nearby bin and wiping his hand on his overalls.

"Despite my impressively advanced age, you should know, I haven't lived a health life," he explained, walking across the kitchen. "I've seen terrible things…the days during the war. The days after the war. Bread riots, witch hunts, pogroms. Things that would make the demonstrations in Wutai City look tame."

Yuffie played back a few seconds of audio over the TC-5500's speakers before using the noisy rewind feature, the distorted squeal of audio playing in reverse drowning out the spin of the motors, until she released the switch.

Victor Io looked taken aback. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend."

"What's to offend? They're…they were messed up." She paused. "I'm surprised you'd heard about them. They don't get much coverage in the press, compared to Junon or Corel or anywhere else."

"They do not," he conceded apologetically.

His suddenly remorse made her a little uncomfortable. "So, terrible things, just like you were saying yesterday," she began, eager to shift the subject.

"They were called that. Though I shouldn't claim to be so special." He looked around the dark, vaulted ceilings above him. "The man who Shinra gave this home too, he probably saw worse things than I."

He paused again. For a few seconds, his eyes seemed to glaze over. Out of the corner of her eyes, Yuffie wondered if this was how someone his age collected their thoughts. "Heidzig," he said finally.

Yuffie looked up at him. "Gesundheit," she joked.

He didn't seem to understand. "Heidzig. Heidzig was his name," he repeated.

"Right, the house's name?"

"My predecessor. Lieutenant Colonel Heidzig. He came from the Junon government-in-exile, he was commander of the military bodyguard assigned to Shinra during the war. After the war, Shinra liked him so much he offered him a post doing the same thing in the new army." He paused. "I think he might've known Shinra better than any man alive."

He was silent for a moment. "The man, not the corporation."

Blinking, Yuffie eagerly reached for the tape recorder's navigation controls again. "Is he still around?"

He shook his head. "No. He was twenty years older than me, at least. Furthermore, the fighting destroyed his health, he didn't live to see the end of the Materia War." He eased back in the dining room chair. "It's a shame he's not around. For what you want? Heidzig's the man you should talk to, not me."

Yuffie snapped her finger off the reversal switch and the spools came to an audibly satisfying halt. "And what is it that I want?" she asked, drawing her arms back to her and narrowing her eyes.

Io's eyes widened by comparison, and she kept her stare on him unflinchingly. She knew her suspicion was self-evident; somehow, she wasn't afraid of scaring him off. But in fact, if Victor Io decided to stand up and leave, there was nothing she could do to stop him that wouldn't involve physical force, or the threat of it, against an old man.

"You're not interested in the story of one old man living in obscurity in Kalm. No one is. You want to conquer evil and defend the innocent. And to do that, you've concluded you must understand the defining event of the Mako Age, the rise and fall of the Shinra Corporation." He put a hand admiringly on the molded plastic shield in its opened position. "I think your conclusion is correct."

_When did I get so patient? _She kept quiet.

"You know, this antique is quite the technological masterpiece," he declared cheerfully. "Look at the craftsmanship behind it, these perfectly machined metal parts, a brushed aluminum shell fitted perfectly at the seams, the perfectly balanced gears, belts and axis."

He glanced back up at her. When she proved unresponsive, he leaned forward and turned the device a quarter of the way towards him without upsetting the microphone. "A genuine Shinra TC-5500 tape recorder. Automatic tension arms to maintain to ensure uniform tape tension. Tape speed selection, reel size selection. Accurate VU—that's volume unit, by the way—meter, gold-plated low-impendence microphone and headphone jacks, shock-resistant casing, internal battery pack, multi-voltage support, and a circuit board that doesn't have a hundredth the computer power of the PHS in your pocket." He looked back at her, smiling ear to ear. She stared at him blankly, eyebrow raised. "I read the instructional manual while you were still sleeping. It's actually quite informative."

"Oh," she managed. She hadn't read it for more than the few minutes it took to figure out how to load and operate it.

"They stopped making these before you were born, probably. And why wouldn't they? A cassette tape recorder does the same job, more or less. It's much small, much lighter, probably more durable, and if it's not, they probably made a million more of the same model to replace them. Nowadays, I'm sure the W.R.O. uses digital audio recorders with solid state storage that can interface with a computer. But this thing, this museum piece from a bygone age…there could only be a handful of these still in private ownership. It might be the most valuable thing still left in this house, given the right consideration."

_I know I say Tifa's all muscle and boobs, but she really should've known better. _"It was a gift," she told him preemptively. Despite herself, she found herself wishing she was recording him.

"It belongs in a museum," he declared, unable to finish without chortling. "Have you ever been to an actual museum? I don't expect Edge has one of those yet, but there're quite a few in Junon. You should visit them one day, while you still can."

"They have museums in Wutai," Yuffie muttered back, as conceitedly as she could.

He nodded. "Now that Shinra is gone, I expect they would. Much of the last two centuries' history is owed to Wutai after all."

She let her body language betray her growing impatience. "Tell me about Fuhito." There was a little edge in her voice now.

"Fuhito," he repeated, as her finger struck the switch to record.

[START]

**Io: **Fuhito. I called him the most dangerous man no one has ever heard of, didn't I?

**Kisaragi: **Yes you did. Was he from Wutai, or do you even know?

**I: **Ah. The correct question. We never discovered his actual name, if it wasn't Fuhito. He may've been from Wutai, part of that diaspora or otherwise part of that cultural legacy. In fact, much of what we know came from the man himself. [PAUSE] An unfortunate reflection of the work we did back in those days.

**K: **Yeah, kind of sloppy.

**I: **I'm relieved to see you in good humor. We did confirm that he came from the Cosmo Canyon collective, like many other members of AVALANCHE. The same as that group's last leader Barret Wallace. [PAUSE] Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. The eco-terrorist organization AVALANCHE is intrinsically linked to Cosmo Canyon, and Fuhito was part of that movement. Maybe the most important part.

**K: **Do you know how Shinra knew this?

**I: **Because the company's intelligence-gathering office was put to the task. In the old days, that was the Department of Administrative Research. Though by your time, they were dissolved into a section within the General Affairs Department.

**K: **The Turks. [PAUSE] I always wanted to know, how closely related related were the Turks and the military?

**I: **Not very at the time. [PAUSE] It would've happened sometime around twenty years ago, in the wave of corporate restricting at the end of the war. President Shinra, at the time, actually opposed it. He always had this sense of prewar nostalgia, hating change, but it was the only was the companies, they were still relatively separate entities at the time, some of them foreign acquisitions, were going to secure power in wake of the government's collapse. There were two men close to the president, Karl Martin Heidegger and Cyrus Veldt. When the war ended, Heidegger resigned from the Midgar Army as a colonel, and went to become the head of the new Public Safety Department. Veldt, or Veld as most people called him, stayed on as head of Administrative Research, the department he'd founded for Shinra during the war.

**K: **So the Turks were around before Heidegger's department?

**I: **Oh yes. During the war, there was no need for an official channel between Shinra and the military. The military said something, or asked for something, and Shinra did it or otherwise produced it. That's how it worked since Shinra came onto the scene. Where was I? [PAUSE] Yes, Veld and Heidegger. Obviously by doing this, Shinra intended a rivalry to form between this two men crucial to his future plans, but actually they were still quite close. Veld was a civilian, and were it not for his influence, I imagine Heidegger would've stayed in the military.

**K: **Veld?

**I: **During the war, Veld, who was your age at the time or even younger, was bankrolled by Shinra to set up a department to shore up the military's own counterintelligence operation. It would be civilian, of course, and officially subordinate to the military, but the company would foot the bill. Mostly they looked at Wutaian saboteurs or spies, that sort of thing, but after the war Veld made sure to keep busy. During the war, Wutai made a lot of enemies among local religious and conservationist groups for hording materia, that's what got it called the Materia War in the first place. After Wutai was stripped of them, and Shinra secured a monopoly on the use of Mako energy, they turned on them. Remember, materia has been around for centuries and we've had Mako energy for more than four decades, but Shinra only started using it to generate electricity on a meaningful scale more than a decade after that, with the Nibelheim Reactor.

**K: **So, sometime after that…AVALANCHE came on the scene.

**I: **Much of this was never confirmed to me personally, but yes. From the perspective of those of us in the military, Veld's department was only going to be around so long as he could demonstrate its actual worth. But Veld was very good finding threats to the company and the military during those years. Cosmo Canyon was one of those places. Enter Fuhito and his accomplices.

**K: **You know, you've told me a lot about history, but not very much about Fuhito. [PAUSE] Is it because, unlike the Turks, the military didn't know much about him either?

**I: **[LAUGHTER] I suppose that's the case! I owe you an apology.

**K: **Don't worry, I'm not angry. Not yet. But you said the military eventually dealt with him?

**I: **I did, didn't I? All right, no more…fancy words, here's what I know: Fuhito was killed by the Turks in year zero-seven, after a seven year insurgency.

**K:** The AVALANCE Insurgency. Sorry, continue.

**I: **Yes, the First AVALANCHE Insurgency. What began as another anti-Midgar campaign from the war holdouts was given some environmentalist credence when new leaders, including Fuhito, arrived on the scene. So in that sense, a group of these insurgents that included Fuhito founded the modern incarnation of AVALANCHE. Fuhito's clique changed the game: more effort was put in coordinating with not just anti-Shinra people, but anti-Midgar and anti-Junon rebels all around the world. In Wutai. Corel. Mideel. Even here in Kalm, or what was left of it after Old Kalm was destroyed. AVALANCHE was an insurgency, but AVALANCHE was also a leadership clique. [PAUSE] From about the new calendar year to zero-seven, the situation got substantial worse, as much as Shinra tried to conceal that fact.

**K: **That was right after the Wutai War, the last one, ended. I remember that…

**I: **That it wasn't that bad?

**K: **Actually, yeah. [PAUSE] I remember that after almost nine years of war, my entire life up 'til then, everyone just gave up. It didn't make any sense to me. But you're saying there was fighting everywhere else?

**I: **Would you like to know the military answer to that question? [PAUSE] After the end of the Second Wutai War, the nine-year-long Materia War and the not hundred-year-long Continental War, Shinra made sure the military completed the process of disarming it had left unfinished since the previous war. Ships, aircraft, weapons, materia, everything that could meant a Third Wutai War, even though most of it actually went unused. So there was no Third Wutai War. Your father, Godo Kisaragi, remained 'mikado', or that's what we called him in Midgar anyway, in return for keeping his side of the bargain. But the military, or at least the old Midgar and Junon Armies, had been organized along lines of fighting another total war for decades. We really had no plan to fight an insurgency that wouldn't simultaneously harm Shinra's interest in the process. [PAUSE] I learned of Fuhito at Fortress Junon, where the Eastern Continent planned to fight an entire Wutaian Navy indefinitely. AVALANCHE wanted to destroy it and use its ammunition magazines and power source for a series of bombings on Midgar. They had more men and resources than we ever predicted, but they failed because of the Junon Army, and Sephiroth, who led the SOLDIER battalion at Junon. I don't mind admitting that we were completely blindsided by the situation, by then the Junon Army had transitioned to peacekeeping duties, policing and maintaining orders, with the navy and air force at higher states of readiness, but that might not even make much sense to you.

**K: **And Fuhito?

**I: **We captured Fuhito. No, that's not right. By then I was at Midgar at the Shinra Building. The Junon Army's military police captured a man who identified himself as Fuhito, only to have him escape when an insurgent with a suicide vest blew up himself and most of a troop company underneath the Sister Ray. If I was Junon instead of Migar, well…

**K: **Sephiroth. Sephiroth was at Junon?

**I: **Yes, as I said earlier. The last report from Sephiroth said he made contact with the insurgent. Regardless of what happened, there was an explosion and Fuhito escaped. I never encountered him alive again.

**K: **So that's what made Fuhito so dangerous. Because he almost turned Junon's weapon of mass destruction against Midgar. But Shinra still beat the First AVALANCHE Insurgency. [PAUSE] I remember when the Sister Ray killed the Weapons and brought down the Northern Crater's barrier. I heard it was the single greatest release of energy generated by humans.

**I: **It probably was, but that wasn't what I meant. In the end, the key to victory was to fight AVALANCHE the way we intended to fight Wutai: attrition. By calendar year seven, the Turks had pursued AVALANCHE for several years, as had the military. The year before, the Midgar Army actually managed to ambush what was probably the largest surviving force of insurgents, after many defeats and defections, thanks to the work of the Turks. It happened outside Midgar, on the highway to Junon. AVALANCHE had to fight like guerillas, because if they wanted armored vehicles or helicopters, they had to take them from us.

**K: **And Fuhito was there. That's where you killed him.

[STOP]

Yuffie had been staring at Victor so intently that she didn't seem him reach for the tape recorder's navigation controls and very deliberately press a switch, the reels stopping immediately. Her eyes went back and forth between him and the player.

"Why'd you stop it?"

He stared at her passively before slowly rising from his chair. Leaving the table, he stood by one of the two densely packed bookcases that flanked the largest window that faced out to the street, its curtains drawn closed. Staring at the shelves, with some effort he reached up for the highest one, took out a thick book, part of a color-coded set, and tossed underhand at the table. Yuffie reached out with her left arm and caught it; he'd been taking care not to throw it in the direction of the reel-to-reel.

"Hey!"

He was already in the process of throwing another book in the set at her. "When Heidzig told me I could come to Kalm, one day, if he and his family and everyone else were long gone, he told me where to find the house, and where to look for the key. He didn't tell me what the combination was to the safe, of course," he said with an almost manic grin. He then turned, and exerting himself, pulled out another book, producing a cloud of dust. Yuffie caught it as well.

"What the heck even are these?" she demanded, glancing at the titles. "Volumes six and seven 'Economic Reports: Anti-Shinra Activities'?"

"One of the things about reaching my age is when you hide things, you run a genuine risk of losing them," he explained, before reaching into the space behind the remaining books on the shelf and drawing his arm back out. In his hand he held a thick envelope made of ridged brownish-green paper. The top was secured shut with a length of red string, which he began undoing. Opening it, he took out a thick pamphlet of printer paper.

_God, more printer paper. _She caught the pamphlet when he tossed it at her, and immediately noticed a faded red stamp on the cover of a red diamond emblem with words next to it in three lines: **STRICT SECRECY PUBLIC SAFETY DEPARTMENT SHIN-RA COMPANY LIMITED**.

"That," he began, slightly out of breath from the effort, "…is a surviving copy of the manifesto of the man called Fuhito. It was surrendered to the Public Safety Department by the Turks after they killed him in the Sector 5 Slums. In it, he described his apprenticeship with the Cosmo Canyon sage named Bugenhagen, his philosophy for political change, and his appraisal of the state of the world and lifeforms occupying it."

He paused, waiting for her response. "I assumed they gunned him down in some alley in the slums. That's usually how these things work out, isn't it?" he asked her, as if she'd know better.

Wide-eyed, Yuffie stared at the faded papers, then back at Victor Io. "And?" was all she managed.

"And I think you should be the one to decide whether or not you actually want the philosophy of Fuhito, the philosophy of AVALANCHE, on the record."

With exaggerated care, she placed it down on the dining table in front of her. "In these interviews…is there a reason you've been acting like I wasn't in AVALANCHE?"

"Well, I assumed you didn't want these interviews to be about you." Looking back at him in surprise, there as a sly grin on the old man's face. She felt herself turn red. "I've said what I needed to—now you'll need to find out for yourself."

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_With the shuffling of scenes, I decided I'd double-down on references to the Japan-only _Before Crisis -Final Fantasy VII- _cellphone game, which is surprisingly still necessary to fill in quite few gaps left from Zack Fair's adventures in his respective game (which almost exclusively involve other members of SOLDIER, appropriately enough) and the events immediately prior to the actual _Final Fantasy VII _story. The dates should, in fact, correspond with that timeline (if anything seems incorrect, don't hesitate to point it out, since I deferred to _Before Crisis _before implementing original dates in that particular regard). Yuffie, like Shalua's younger sister Shelke, was apparently born in in November, 1991. In ten years, the (Second) Wutai War has begun and concluded, and AVALANCHE has begun their insurgency in earnest (at least, the Turks seem to think so). Fuhito's apprenticeship under Bugenhagen is not my invention (one can assume an ancient sage like him had quiet a few students in his time). Chickens, and oranges, presumably exist on Planet (Gaia). But it's not all doom and gloom. Hopefully you can see the gradual setup for other characters (I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this story will not begin and end with interviews on Victor Io, or at least that's not the plan). Remember that, as noted in the first preamble, all characters in this story are (occasionally) unreliable witnesses. _

_Anyway, as always please let me know you're reading, what you liked, what you didn't like (and if I should continue!) with a review. As noted, I ended up falling behind on my other writings to put this out, so a longer wait until the next chapter might be expected. _


	8. Manifesto

**_Preamble: _**_Apologies in advance: this is a LOT of world-building and philosophical treatise, even by my standards, especially given the wait. Hopefully it leads to somewhere enjoyable, but I was sitting on the text of the manifesto itself for some time and really felt obligated to include it._

* * *

**Manifesto. **Yuffie was still angry at him. Angry at him because the minute he'd given her the manifesto, she'd realized that she couldn' justt bring it to the Kalm Library to have it copied or digitized or whatever else they would do and forget about it. Angry because she realized the moment she did it, this document, left unread for years, would stop being a secret. Angry because what that could have meant for AVALANCHE.

_What kind of idiot reads a document into a tape recorder? _"This kind of idiot, apparently." The TC-5500 was sitting within arm's reach on the table. In her other hand was a cheaply printed booklet with a light blue paper cover. The title was printed under an obstructive red stamp declaring it secret by Shinra's Public Safety Department, the red ink fading from the diamond-shaped emblem.

"Corporate Society and its Industrial Future," she read the title aloud and cutting through the silence of Heidzig House's sitting room. Moving the microphone on it stand, she pressed down on the metallic recording switch.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **I'm at Heidzig House. In front of me is the a copy of a booklet allegedly written by Fuhito, a member of AVALANCHE killed by Shinra sometime before Barret Wallace assumed leadership of the cell in Midgar. [PAUSE] It looks like this copy was concealed by the Shinra, and even Fuhito's death, were concealed by Shinra and the military through the present. Why, I don't know, because it seems obvious that Shinra would've benefited to publicized something like this, but through the entire AVALANCHE Insurgency they never even suggested there was an earlier campaign under different leaders, even internally…

[STOP]

She felt her own hand pressing the switch, out of instinct, and gave a sigh. _That was rambling. Crap. _

Rambling was no use to anyone, especially on a topic like this. She considered traveling the tape backwards and recording over it, but felt the laziness or a desire to procrastinate deterred her.

_So, all these years later, the W.R.O. never found any mention of someone called Fuhito in Shinra's internal archives. Which could mean a few different things. It could mean that he might only be mentioned in documents that Edge City hasn't recovered yet. Or they might not be in Midgar at all, and instead at Junon instead. We never found the Turks' records, after all._

Should she have been writing this down?

_Or, it means that Fuhito didn't actually exist. _

She considered the possibility. It wasn't as though someone like Victor Io wouldn't have a plenty of time in the last three years to fabricate the whole thing. That was assuming Victor Io was Victor Io. Until now, the old man had shown her no papers, no authentic documents, no evidence to his identity beyond the suspicious Heidzig House, which by itself was hardly certain proof.

And if he was who he said he was, was that better reason to take him at his word? A military officer and an employee of the Shinra Corporation. _So, either way it kind of sucks. But it's not like I've got nothing._

She took the booklet again, staring at the blue cover. Shinra's ink stamp was fading but still very legible, and her training suggested it was authentic. **REVIEWED ON 5 OCTOBER, εуλ 0007. **The date was appropriate—Shinra had only obtained this four years ago, however many years after it had been composed by Fuhito.

"And Fuhito isn't around to defend himself," she joked privately. "If he ever existed. Which he might not have."

With exaggeration caution, she opened the cover to the first page, then remembered to hit the recording switch.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **Corporate Society and its Industrial Future. That's the title. First page, introduction—its words, not mine. There's a lot here. [PAUSE] The electrification and corpora…tization of Planet has had catastrophic consequences on humankind. They have greatly increased the material wealth and life expectancy of those of us privileged enough to live in cities and urbanized zones, but there we have witnessed firsthand the misery, degradation, and psychological suffering brought on by the technological ascendance of our species over all others. The current racing pace of capitalism-driven technological and industrial development will inevitably worsen this situation, and will certainly subject humans to greater degradation, but in particular it will continue to inflict escalating harm on the natural world, which will have unavoidable consequences even among the most fortunate and affluent in the urbanized zones. [PAUSE] Okay, this is…a lot. But I guess we can be pretty sure Io wasn't just making it up. That, or he's some kind of evil genius. Sorry, continuing. [LOUDER] At the core of this paradigm is the trans…national corporate body Shinra, where it has remained in in the last decades since the development of its most important industrial technology, the Mako Electrical Powerplant or Mako Reactor. Shinra's global system of scientific control may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it will aspire towards a lower level of public degradation and psychological suffering from its industrial-technological might as to ensure its own political and social indispensability, but this will only occur at the continued cost of physical suffering and environmental degradation necessary to sustain the global corporate machinery. Such a system would not necessarily need to continue exclusively under the dominant character of Shinra; it might take on an affiliation under another corporation or a nation-state, but the consequences are inevitable. [PAUSE] There is no way of reforming or modifying the system to stave off a global calamity.

[STOP]

"Okay, this is ridiculous." Yuffie pushed the microphone stand away from her, shaking her head. Even if she couldn't rule on the document's authenticity, any suspicion that the document was an invention of Victor Io's lonely mind and free time in Kalm was assuaged. _If he was smart enough to write this sort of thing, he wouldn't be some hermit in Kalm. _

Running a hand over her forehead, she looked back at the papers. She didn't feel like reading aloud anymore.

_If the system were to broken apart and destroyed, the consequences will still be catastrophic. But the greater the system is allowed to grow the more catastrophic the consequences of its collapse, so if it is to be destroyed it would be wisest to do so sooner rather than later. _

She brushed a mote of dust from her eyes. _We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not require violence; it may be sudden or it may take years or decades to complete. I cannot predict any of that. But I do intend to describe a path for those of us who intend to resist this system in order to save the living organism of the Planet, as taught to us by the sage Bugenhagen. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object is will not be to usher in a world free of suffering and injustice. It is to create a world free of humankind's subjugation of the Planet to its whims. _

Fuhito. Whoever he was, he had a way with words that Barret didn't. She propped her chin against her arm. _Maybe Barret knew him. _If she did, she suspected she wasn't going to enjoy asking him. She ran a finger down the page, smudging the cheap typewriter ink, then flipped through the pages. The text was divided into sections or chapters, each with a capitalized title or header, just as the first had begun with 'Introduction'. _Well, that's convenient. _She skipped through the first few pages again, stopping on the forth page.

She smoothed the page's wrinkled corners out. **THE MAKO ENERGY INDUSTRY**. _With the development of reliable electricity production from Mako energy and the newfound profitability in their electric power company, Shinra predictably abandoned all ongoing research into exotic power generation from radioactive transmutation, as well as refinement of its existing expertise in steam turbine power generation, with regards to fossil fuels, as well as concentrated solar power and underground hydrothermal circulation. In particular, two major controversies existed for fossil fuels. The first was environmental, and should be of particular interest to us: Shinra could accurately claim that use of fossil fuels—principally coal, oil, and natural gas—demonstrated a history of immediate environmental harm and long-term alteration of the climate via carbon dioxide levels, and that divestment was in the best interests of both humankind and the rest of Planet's living ecosystem. And almost certainly three decades ago, Shinra nor anyone else possessed a clear reckoning of the Lifestream's vital importance to all terrestrial life forms, humans included, beyond the religious and cultural, though the corporation had an early awareness of the toxicity of natural and unnatural high levels of mako exposure. _

_The second was geopolitical. Though it has been publicly denied since by both sides of the war, the historical motivation for the emergence of the Wutaian Empire was scarcity of land suitable for agriculture, or 'living space'. The World War of the last century can be attributed to scarcity of land but particularly scarcity of resources, above all, fuel. The Wutaian Empire's mountain coal and oceanic oil reserves, and their deficiencies, are reasoned today for the late arrival of the industrial revolution in Wutai. By obvious contrast, the Eastern Continent's industrial revolution, beginning in the Midgar Basin before reaching the Junon coast, predated it by practically a century. Shinra's own postwar scholarship claimed after analysis that the Wutaian Empire's entire prewar electrical energy needs could've been met by just part the mako energy reserves in the Wutai Home Islands alone. While this may sound like corporatist propaganda, its further acceptance by military scholarship in Junon gives it substantial weight. Mako energy would've changed history. _

Yuffie stared at the blocky letters, her eyes wide. 'Wutai', 'Wutaian'. None of this theory—that the Great Wutai War or the one that followed it were the consequences of fuel and land shortages in Wutai—had ever so much as been uttered to her. Not in Wutai and not in the East since she'd arrived. The line in Midgar, before and after Shinra, was that Wutai's colonial war in the Western Mainland was "manifest destiny"—the foreign concept that the Wutaians, her people, were destined to expand across the continent, from the Nibel Mountains to the Corel Basin, from Cosmo Canyon to Costa del Sol, and not the descendants of Easterners from the Midgar Basin and Junon. As stupid as it sounded to her, it fit with the stories her father told her, from the opposing perspective.

Not one had once mentioned fuel, or 'living space'. _The closest thing is Shinra's reason for starting the Second Wutai War, rights to build a Mako Reactor in…_

Her thoughts stopped.

That was Wutai's explanation, wasn't it? And by happenstance, the explanation of AVALANCHE and the W.R.O.. But was it actually what happened?

_Tifa would say don't believe everything you hear. Or read. _Good advice, all things considering. Holding back a twitch, she flipped back to the second page of the booklet. "The Science of the Political Left," she read aloud. "Oh, this'll be good."

**THE SCIENCE OF THE POLITICAL LEFT. **_Practically everyone must agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One manifestation of this disturbed atmosphere was the consolidation of anti-Shinra politics on the leftist band of the political spectrum, so a discussion of the science of leftist politics under Shinra's corporate domination can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general. But what is leftism? In the prewar and pre-Shinra half of the last century, leftism was identified with the Junon socialism of the prior century. Today leftist politics under Shinra are left in disarray and organized, if it can been called, solely along the lines of organized labor and trade unions firmly under Shinra's yoke. Who can be called a leftist? The company's enemies, or the company's well-heeled servants? In the prior political age, we mostly spoke of socialists, collectivists, feminists, gay and lesbian advocates, and other "politically correct" types. In actuality, such widely disparate groups will possess widely disparate political objectives, and it is necessary for us to consider how those goals align with our struggle against this corporate society._

She frowned. _God, I hope it's not all rambling like this. _She skipped down towards the end of chapter.

_The Shinra Corporation had previously made it a mission to intellectually neutralize any sort of dangerous political thought, from either the left or the right of the political spectrum, after it succeeded in the goal it shared with the governments of the Midgar Confederation: to materially neutralize any sort of dangerous political force from the West, principally the Wutaian Empire. Shinra had committed serious errors after the Hundred Years War; the failed Wutaian rebellion of the Second Wutai War should never have been allowed to happen. Such complacency would not be repeated, or so Shinra believed. The political purge that followed reflected that fierce attitude of prevention. Shinra's predecessors in the government had successfully cleansed Junon of its leftist opposition in the Hundred Years War. As recently as May of εуλ 0003, Shinra demonstrated their willingness to use the most brutal methods to pacify dissident labor in the township of Corel, mirroring the wartime destruction of historic Kalm less than ten years earlier. Shinra's tolerance for the political left begins and ends with labor agitation. _

Yuffie felt herself in a cold sweat. "Well, if there's one thing Fuhito and Shinra agreed on, they both hated leftists."

"Who hated who?"

Yuffie almost jumped out of her seat and turned to see Victor Io sitting in the hallway. She felt herself turn red; she'd been so engrossed in her reading she hadn't heard him entering through the door to the yard.

"A lot of people," she blurted out. "I'm starting to get that impression from this."

The old man stared at her. "I imagine that you would," he finally added. "He was an…unpleasant customer, or so I've been told."

_Imagine? _"Have you ever read this?" she asked pointedly.

"No, actually. As I told you, I didn't really know Fuhito. I left this…I leave this…to better men than myself." He scratched the wrinkles on his right temple after dropping his gardening tools by the door. "And better women."

She ignored him and looked back at the booklet. "So you knew you had this, and you never read it."

After sitting down in an empty chair in the kitchen and gingerly stretching his legs, he shook his head. Yuffie stared at him. _I really can't tell if he's lying or not. So let's try a different approach. _"Because, so far…it's a heck of a read."

"I can imagine so," he repeated. Yuffie twitched. "So, will the W.R.O. release it? To the general public, I Mean, after you've delivered it to them, I mean."

She scoffed at him. _What are you, stupid? _She managed to hold that back. "N-No," she blurted out instead. "I don't think so. Not in the immediate future, anyway."

"Really?" The old man yawned, and Yuffie realized it was already late in the day. "That's a shame."

"Well, I'm sorry to rain on your dreams of being the next great whistleblower," she chided him. "But you can't just make something like this available to, you know, the public, okay?"

"Why not?"

"Because people aren't fu-…freakin' ready for it, that's why not!" she snapped.

He smiled drowsily. "I'm sorry that someone so young would be so cynical."

"Oh, shove it." She shut the pamphlet and put both her hands on it, as if containing some sort of magic talisman. "You know what, Shinra was right not to release this either. Some things are better left forgotten." _And considering I didn't even know the name Fuhito before coming to Kalm, maybe we'll be lucky for once and it'll stay forgotten. _

Io didn't seem so bothered. "Well, either way, I'm sure it's in good hands now."

She watched him. "You look tired," she concluded. "Why don't we continue tomorrow, bright and early?"

"Oh, I'm not that sleepy." He yawned again, with almost comedic timing. "The gardening just…" he trailed off.

Yuffie rolled her eyes and after taking the manifesto, stood up from her chair. "Yeah, right. Don't worry, I'll get my own food, like a grownup," she told him as she made her way to the backdoor.

"Well, let me know if you change your mind," she heard him announce helpfully. Holding back a sigh, she folded the manifesto in half lengthwise before cramming it into her the inner pocket of her vest. Most of it stuck awkwardly out from underneath her vest, even after she zipped it up. The air was tolerably clear; they were upwind of the power stations, for now.

She knew that, as in Edge City, Wutaian cuisine or something attempting to pass as it had proliferated in Kalm. Legend had it that Midgar had better Southern Wutaian barbeque than the Wutai Isles themselves, courtesy of émigré from the west, but with Meteorfall she'd never learn the truth behind that claim. She'd never been a picky eater, even as a child; she settled on the first Wutaian fast food joint she'd found, not concerned with the menu, and she was pleased to see her food delivered in the same paperboard pails you'd find Edge.

"And you're faster than the coffeeshop!" she declared, sitting alone in a booth by a window overlooking the alley leading back to Market Street. The server, a Wutaian boy younger than her, stared at her and nodded, her meaning clearly loss on him.

"Uh…beef yakisoba and the tempura shrimp?" he asked.

"That's me. _Domo_," she added quickly as she took both cartons and split apart the disposable chopsticks. The waiter promptly began busing the adjacent booth—she was halfway through her noodles when he paused in front of her, arms full of empty cartons and bowls.

"Sorry, _ojousan_, but what's that?"

With a mouth full of noodle, she looked back at the waiter and down to see Fuhito's manifesto almost falling out of her vest. "Oh, it's just an interview I'm working on. I'm a journalist," she assured him.

"Oh." The boy looked just as uninformed as he had earlier, but turned and left without another word. With her free hand she crammed the manifesto as deep into the pocket as she could manage. _If I was Tifa, I could store a whole volume of _Economic Reports: Anti-Shinra Activities _in my cleavage. But I'm not Tifa_, she thought with a grin.

Despite the private joke at her old friend's expense, she found herself reaching into her pocket and fishing out her PHS. _This isn't over. Thanks to Victor Io, this has started. And it won't end with me, no matter how much I'd like. _She felt the pamphlet against her breast. _August will need to know. Reeve will need to know. _

_Barret will need to know. _

The file, like so many others, would probably end up in the W.R.O. Archives and Records Administration. "I need to talk to Barret," she announced, dropping a few coins onto the table.

Returning to the Heidzig House, she found the old man sitting on the same chair she'd left him on, sound asleep but holding a paperback novel over his face with one hand. Poking him in the shoulder, the paperback fell to the floor and his arm went slacked. Frowning, she picked up the arm by the hand and almost dropped it. His hand was ice cold, as was his other one after he touched it.

"God, you're like a stereotype for old people!" she muttered, leaving the kitchen and returning with a blanket she'd seen in the study. Draping it over him, she shook her head and returned to the large table in the study where she'd left the TC-5500. Her hand was already on the folded booklet with its blue paper cover when she groaned and stomped back outside, into a covered section of the yard, having flipped open her PHS.

"This is what I get for listening to Rufus Shinra," she muttered, using the keypad to bring up the device's stored contact numbers. "I mean, the man ordered Tifa's execution, what exactly was I expecting?" she asked herself as she highlighting the number for August Fitzroy's office in the Kalm Library.

"I mean, sure, Cloud probably would've killed him if it wasn't for that dumb bodyguard cat of his, but the point still stands…" she grumbled under her breath. As the dial tone sounded, she tightened her grip around the PHS's molded plastic shell. When Shinra was still around, two new models of PHS came out a year at least, usually more. The whole personal electronics development had slowed since then.

August Fitzroy picked up shortly, his tinny voice rushed. "_Boss! Go-goshdarnit boss, you took long enough, I've been trying to reach you for a day and a half!_"

"Yeah, sorry about that August." She had silenced her voicemail long ago. "Wait, did something happen?"

"_Wait, you don't…_" August cursed. "_Okay, sorry, you go first._"

She rolled her eyes. "Fine. So, besides that whole…Directory thing, do you actually have city historical records at over there?"

"_Well, yeah, Boss, we would. It's a library. What're thinking of?_" He sounded calmer.

"First, don't call me 'Boss'. Second…and this is going to sound strange, but do you have any records that might otherwise have been destroyed?" The confused silence over the line confirmed her suspicions. "Yeah, I know."

"_Can you be any more specific?_"

"This would've happened during the Second Wutai War, so sometime from the end of 1991 to calendar year one." She paused. "In fact, if it did happen, it was probably around 1996 or…"

"_Or 1997, yeah, during Wutai's behind-enemy-lines campaign. I was still in Midgar, never thought I'd be thankful for that. But…Kalm? Not just Old Kalm?_"

"Not exactly." She paused, clenched her jaw, and looked around guiltily. "Is there anything pertaining to when Kalm itself was destroyed? Not by Wutai, but by the Midgar Army fighting Wutai?"

Silence, this time from shock. "_B-…ma'am, you mean this Kalm? The Kalm we're standing in right now? New Kalm?_"

She sighed. "Yeah. Maybe part of Old Kalm District or something?"

"_You're joking, right?_"

"Yeah, August, I joke about how Shinra destroyed all or part of your hometown a decade ago and covered it up, 'cause it's such a funny topic."

"_I get it, sorry. I…this is going to sound strange coming from him, but I'm not sure even Shinra could do that and have no one realize it. I mean, there are some ruins from the township of Old Kalm that were either destroyed by the army to root out Wutai during the Hundred Years War, or when the commandos abandoned their positions, but…_"

It was going nowhere. "Yeah, I know, Kalm isn't Nibelheim. Just looked up anything relevant to unintended destruction, friendly fire, outdated military maps, even the cover up from that time period. Anything that looks good, no matter how weird. You can put the request to HQ too, if my doesn't look secure, just use my PHS's tracking and send a courier."

"_What do you think you'll find?_"

"I'm not sure. And I don't know what exactly it has to do with Deepground either." _I'm really counting on Rufus Shinra having not totally screwed me here. _She sighed at the thought. "I read something interesting, that's all."

"_Speaking of reading, __Shinra was officially supposed to open their archives—the ones they still had—a year after Midgar fell._"

She sighed. "Yeah, well, Shinra was also supposed to officially pay restitutions of some sort. Then every chump with a truck and a shovel decided to push the bodies out of the way and take everything that wasn't bolted down," she grumbled. _How the heck do you get Shinra to pay restitutions if we can't even figure out what Shinra still owns? _

"_You still there, ma'am?_"

She blinked. "Yeah, I am. Hey, what was it you were freaking out about before?"

"_Wow, y__ou really don't know? Haven't you turned on a radio or something? The W.R.O. issued on arrest warrant. On _him_._"

Yuffie frowned. "Wait, what? They're going after Domino?" She cursed loudly before whispering again. "Damn it, I've been investigating Domino for eighteen freaking months and they wait till I leave to issue a warrant? Son of a…"

He cut her off. "No, not Domino! They arrested Hart!"

"What?" She cursed again. "Hart?" She swore again, and louder, practically yelling.

J. Steiner Hart had been the last Deputy Mayor of Midgar under the Luigi Domino Administration, even more of a corporate appointee than Domino himself, since his office was unelected. The two had publicly disliked each other for the last few years of the Midgar Metropolitan government but had reconciled after the city's destruction and the founding of Edge. After immediately repudiating Shinra, Domino had held one seat or another on the Edge City Council since its creation—now he was running for mayor, with a good chance of winning.

Hart, on the other hand, had gotten out of politics entirely, and pursued his second profession, between his first one, teaching mathematics to Shinra's princelings, the overly privileged offspring of high-level management, and his third calling, politics: investment financing. He'd been one of the best investment bankers in Midgar before his political appointment, and helped finance the construction of Gold Saucer for no less than President Shinra himself. Now, after Shinra, he'd formed the Intercontinental Properties Group, with offices from Edge to Wutai.

Yuffie had been quietly investigating Domino for abuse of political power, not Hart, as well as possible foreign interference and even sabotage of Edge's upcoming mayoral and council elections. But she knew I.G.P. was made up of bankers from what had been Shinra Electric Power Company's financial arm, close to Hart, and assisted its rich clients in the recovering funds lost with the collapse of Shinra's corporate empire as well as complicated legal transfers of wealth between Wutai and the continents.

She hadn't really cared about Hart: whatever financial maleficence he was guilty of was becoming increasingly normalize in Edge, and it was Domino's concentration of power she feared.

"What did they get him for? Let me guess, money laundering? I bet it was money laundering." She barely even understood the concept of laundering before the W.R.O. began investigating I.G.P. in earnest.

"_Try sex trafficking._"

"You're joking? What, for his clients?" Hart had a reputation for womanizing even back in Midgar, but he wasn't the deviant his clients were known to be. At least, that's what Yuffie thought.

"_Looks like it. Let me tell you, the prosecutors were not happy about this. I guess the chairman pushed them into it. You might still nail Domino yet._" He paused. "_Sorry, bad choice of words._"

_If I nail Domino, I want it to be for trying to take over the Edge City government, not for free flights on Hart's sex party plane. _"Yeah…" she mumbled before cursing a third time. She really didn't need this now, with a brief pang of nausea coming seemingly from nowhere.

"_I mean, I won't miss him either, but this really happened at a bad time, whether Reeve knows it or not. It's going to kill any financial conferences in Edge for the next six months, at the very least._"

"Oh, who cares about a bunch of rich bank…people," she hissed. "This is gonna' have very real consequences on the W.R.O. operational fundraising, you know that? And you can forget your precious Directory the second the rich and famous realize their contributions are bankrolling a bunch of computers that might one day track all their sex-scapades."

"_Oh, crap, I didn't even think of that._"

"Yeah, Reeve's hardheaded sense of morality may've really screwed us over this time," she speculated quietly. "Especially if he wants to pass through that new security budget."

"_Not to mention the Junon Operation._"

Yuffie groaned. "Hey, how's this for an order: don't talk about the Junon Operation. Ever."

"_Yes ma'am_!"

"Or the Friends of Junon. Or the Committee for a Free Junon. Or any of those other state-sponsored lunatics. 'Cause right now, you're my state-sponsored lunatic, got it?" she asked. She was about to chide August further when she saw some movement out of the extreme corner of one eye; her whole body snapped into tension, turning back into the Heidzig House to see a half-asleep Victor Io standing in the kitchen, barefooted, clutching the blanket she'd left on him.

"Who are the Friends of Junon?" he asked groggily before yawning. "I apologize for eavesdropping."

She snapped the PHS shut with one hand. "…no one?"

"Oh. Good night then," he muttered again, wandering in the direction of the stairs, still holding the blanket. Yuffie didn't move until she was certain he had climbed up the stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor.

She wanted to hit herself in the head, but held back. _Man, maybe I'm the reason we have a problem with leaks._

* * *

**_Author's Notes: _**

_I return. As I promised myself, I put some attention to earlier works (two chapters for two earlier stories, including my primary work), so at least there's that. At least you had a long chapter to look forward to, even if it probably feels rather disjointed as the combination of a few different concepts I wanted to last year. What it means is a lot of worldbuilding, for those who enjoy that sort of thing (for those who don't, I apologize), particularly in the form of Fuhito's spooky and historically inspired manifesto. Hopefully it was everything it needed to be: in truth, the cell phone game he exclusively appears in doesn't give us that much to work with regarding Fuhito, and his ideology stated in it is mostly just what Square-Enix needed in any given appearance. The manifesto probably doesn't narrow it down that much, but at least it demonstrates he was a thinker when he was leading AVALANCHE. It also, to my surprise, forced me to decide between Yuffie actively reading the document out, or simply presenting it as text…and as in the past, I ended up deciding to do both, and hoping it's not a big pain for the reader. _

_At the very least, I don't expect chapter to take nearly this long (and it will probably be notably shorter, with the absence of this one's intellectual madness). I hoping for it to be less discussion-driven and Yuffie being Yuffie, though I still need to determine exactly what that is. At least we got to see Yuffie flex a little bit of her acquired political leadership muscle of the last three years. As always, thank you for staying with this and feel free to let me know if you are! _


	9. Simon Heidzig

_**Preamble: **_

_You might be surprised to learn this chapter is actually well ahead of schedule (considering the time I appointed to other stories). It's also a lot less world-building and a lot more characters being characters, mostly. _

* * *

**Simon Heidzig.** Looking up from couch without moving her head, her eyes wandered to the fuzzy, monochrome picture of Heidzig House's ancient television, dutifully receiving the airwaves through the rooftop aerials. The picture was clear enough that she could see a man in some variety of military uniform rising from his seat at a round table and angrily gesturing.

"_There's being polite, and there's being insulted. And these insinuations, frankly, are just that: insulting. If you're claiming that State of Junon is attempting to resurrect the Shinra Corporation's pre-Meteorfall corporate autocracy, I ask you this, sir: where is your proof? Where is your global corporate empire?_"

The figure standing nearest to the military man seemed to try and calm him down with no success. Depending on his level of importance, the man from the Junon military should've been someone she could recognize, but between the inferior picture from the television and her own laziness, she didn't feel like answering that question.

"_Has anyone told you that you protest too much_?"

"_Has anyone ever asked you to present proof with your accusations_?" the military man countered.

_What exactly do we expect when our political advocates are all such bold-faced morons? _It was hard to watch news television and not find the whole situation very bleak.

Between pauses in the arguing, she heard the stirring of the old man, incoherent mumbling and the occasional short breath. The apparent moderator, a younger man in a suit with what looked dreadlocks in the soft picture, gestured with a pen. "_As Junon's parliament has claimed, this ongoing military buildup is the formal response to these multiple crises in the aftermath of Midgar's destruction: the Reunion attacks, then the appearance of the Deepground Army_…"

The camera switched. "_But if that's the case, why is Junon investing in its army and navy, and not modern security forces like those in Edge? Or even better, joining the shared security and counterterrorism framework of the W.R.O.?_" the earlier accuser questioned, a man she quickly recognized.

"_What, so the leaders of Edge and the World Regenesis Organization can accuse of us creating a police state? And as for membership in the organization, with advocates like yourself, it's not surprising that…_"

The military man's voice cut with a turn of the large knob, the set switching off. The old man stirred again, almost talking in his sleep.

"So, old man, you want to tell me what Fuhito's meant with all that?" she muttered softly under her breath. "Oh, wait, you couldn't, because you said you've never read it. Thanks."

It was useless to be angry though. Even before his unexpected hospitability, the old man had been more accommodating than her wildest dreams. Who thought a ranking veteran of Shinra's pre-Meteor military forces would be willingly spilling his guts for her? A smile came over Yuffie's face as she sat up properly in the armchair, feeling its plush, unoffending armrests to her sides.

_Really, I should be thanking Rufus, as much as I hate the idea. This has worked better than my wildest expectations. Assuming he's actually real to begin with, he told me basically everything he knew about Fuhito, AVALANCHE's original leader. And he's actually willing to talk about those years that no actually in AVALANCHE is old enough to remember, and people like Bugenhagen pretend never happened. _

She smirked. _Yeah, all thanks to the Wise Sage Bugenhagen, spiritual leader of AVALANCHE and current day pain in my ass. _

And mentor to Fuhito, the man who apparently tried to destroy the whole world. If what she'd been told was accurate, which it might not be. All the same, everything that the old man had told her, everything that he'd been willing to be say on tape even. Could she really ask for more?

_He didn't tell me what the combination was to the safe, of course_, she heard herself say inside her mind.

Lieutenant Colonel Heidzig, from Junon. The first leader of President Shinra's bodyguard, dead before the end of the Second Wutai War. Replaced by Major Io from Midgar. The same Victor Io who was sleeping under a blanket in the kitchen, boots and gardening overalls sticking out from under it. _This is why you need to plan your retirement, I bet. _

She was on her feet, climbing up the stairs with a deeply-rooted ninja deliberateness. An unnecessary deliberateness, because aside from inconveniencing a sleepy old man, what consequences were there for waking him up? _Old habits die hard. _

On Heidzig House's second floor, across from the bathroom and the master bedroom, was a sitting room and adjoined study. In that study, behind heavy wooden desk and flanked on either side by shuttered windows, was a portrait of a man in military uniform. It may've been Heidzig, or it might've been a Heidzig's father or some other dead man from the past.

Her curiosity had limits. Behind the extremely conspicuous portrait, as she suspected, was a wall safe about a meter and a half from the floor and thirty centimeters diagonally, recessed into the wall. There was a handle and a mechanical single-dial lock, along with a pair of keyholes.

_I could get a W.R.O. lock-cracking team here in ten minutes. But where would be the fun in that? _

She was prepared to irreparably damage the lock to open the safe, but turned out not to be necessary. After a few minutes with the tools she had on hand, the safe opened with an unpleasantly loud creaking and inside she found the exact same thing experience told her was inside most safes: smaller boxes. Rolling back a chair covered with the same years-old layer of dust as everything else in the study, she took the first of the narrow, worn-out cardboard boxes and opened it.

"You're joking."

Someone had the same idea she had: the contents were a half-dozen minicassettes, each with a paper label with a handwritten series of numbers. She was prepared to play a game of 'Guess of the Shinra Company media format' when shaking the box revealed what looked like a compatible cassette player. _Wow, everything's coming up Yuffie. _

Shinra's minicasettes—she wasn't sure what the official name was, but that was what everyone called them—were just a shrunken version of the magnetic tape audio format compact cassettes that Shinra put out more than a decade before she was born, used for pre-recorded music. Though Shinra had planned to replace it with the similarly named compact disc, or CD, format, Meteorfall and Shinra's own decline had ended that. The minicasette format had never been intended for music, but was a common tool of office dictation, and the MCC-610 Personal Dictator, as the little device awkwardly described itself, made that clear. She'd seen enough MCC-610_s _still in use at W.R.O. headquarters to know to check the battery compartment on the other side.

Finishing, she took another cardboard box from the safe, set it aside the first, and opened it. Its heft and weight had indicated less uniform contents than the first box, and it didn't disappoint: rolls of photographic film in their plastic cases, a small paper notebook like the kind she kept but older, a few aged military decorations attached to colored pieces of ribbon, a polished brass cigarette case with a variation of the Shinra diamond stamped into the lid, and other small, outdated knickknacks.

"God, maybe _that's _why you're all dead," she grumbled, prying open the cigarette case. Instead of cigarettes, a single, pocket-size photograph fluttered out with faded colors.

She flipped it over. Three men posing in front of what she soon recognized was the Junon Upper City, as seen from an inbound ship, the Sister Ray still in service in the background. She looked at the men closer. All three of them bore some resemblance to the painting she'd taken down, so she presumed the eldest, wearing the same dark red uniform the men at Healen Lodge, was Heidzig. The young man on his right was wearing the archetypical dark blue battle dress uniform used by the military under Shinra, minus the helmet and body armor, while the young man on his left wore the same pattern of clothing but in dark green. _Shinra's naval infantry. _

"So, the father and brothers Heidzig," she guessed out loud, taking out the plastic headphones she carried in her vest for playback with the TC-5500, and plugging it into the audio jack in the minicassette player. The cassettes were labeled with six-digit dates which cycled back to zero for the new calendar. Taking the latest, she saw it was from summer of the last year of the Second Wutai War. _He said that Heidzig didn't survive the war. So if that's true, this might be the last…_

She felt a pang of guilt. "Sorry, Victor Io. If it were just me, I wouldn't be doing this. But I have a grown-up job with grown-up responsibilities to consider," she told herself, loading the minicasette into the player and shutting the smooth plastic action. "So it's time for Yuffie Kisaragi to possibly listen to the voice of a dead man."

_Last thing anyone we need is thinking of the Shinra as being human_, she thought, holding back a laugh.

According to the casette's plastic case, the tape allowed for thirty minutes of playback, between two sides. She was prepared for precipitous drop in quality compared to the 13-cm reel recording tape used in the she wasn't prepared for was the high-pitched screeching at the beginning of the tape that nearly made pull off the headphones. She held down in the small fast forward switch until she was confident that the screeching had been replaced by squeaky human voices. _What the hell was that?_

[START]

**First Speaker: **You think it's that bad?

**Second Speaker: **[MUCH OLDER SOUNDING] You wanted the truth, didn't you? [PAUSE] In my opinion, yes, I think the man at the top has lost it. Realistically thinking, how far are we from even breaking ground on New Midgar? Ten years? Twenty years? Do you think either of us will be around to even see that?

**1S: **Well, the man at the top better be. You know his son will never agree to it, not if he's in charge.

**2S: **God willing he will be. [HOARSE COUGH] In either case, I won't be there to see it.

**1S: **Come on, don't say that, Colonel. [LAUGHTER] You've always hated the Midgar Basin, wouldn't you want to see the Promised Land?

**2S: **[DIFFICULT LAUGHTER] What I want, Saunders, is irrelevant. What I think is I won't.

**Saunders: **I think you have ten more years, easily. Especially if you quit the cigarettes and the drink.

**2S: **You're always thinking that way, it must be something medics do. [PAUSE] Well, as Vic would say, no matter what happens, there's always Junon.

**S: **[LAUGHTER] With all respect, sir, of course he'd say that.

[PAUSE]

She lifted her finger from adjacent pause switch. _So the second voice, that belongs to Heidzig, it must. And he was talking to…someone named Saunders? _Frowning, she pressed the fast-forward switch for a few seconds before playing the tape again.

[PLAY]

**Heidzig: **Of course it was. If you don't believe me, ask Io. He remembers the democratic period, he was around. Let me put it this way, how do you think the company ended up ruling the world? Because Shinra is a genius? Or because the elected leaders of the Confederation were all morons?

**Saunders: **Some of both?

**H: **Well, they were morons, but at least they were capable opportunists. That meant Shinra didn't need to kill them. [PAUSE] And, if something should happen to Shinra, god help you all, because they'll come crawling back and there will be no saving you. [SIGH] You're too young to remember a time before Shinra clearly. The fundamental laws of reality haven't changed. You don't get ahead by being clever. You don't get ahead by being beautiful. You get ahead by being a subtle crook. [COUGH]

[STOP]

Raising an eyebrow, she ejected the minicasette and flipped it over: on the reverse side, a small paper label, but with more tiny handwriting then six digits. "Conversations with staff, N.M.A.," she read aloud. _New Midgar Army? _

Gingerly turning the tape over again and setting it aside, she glanced back at the pile. There was another tape from the same year, marked **02-01-99 **on one side and cryptically **L.D. **on the other. Sighing, she took the tape, loaded it, and braced herself for more electronic screeching, only to hear no such thing when playback began.

[START]

**First Speaker: **I want to assure you, Simon—do you mind if I call you Simon? I want to be perfectly clear about what I think is bothering you.

**Heidzig: **And what's that, Mr. Director?

**Director: **I assure you, that SOLDIER will not be taking the military's role as bodyguards the president. Not during this revolt, or after it. SOLDIER will not be charged with guarding the president's person, not under my watch anyway. You may get some trouble from the Turks admittedly, but you won't get any from me.

**H: **Well…thank you, Mr. Director. That…means a lot to me. And the rest of the battalion, of course. We may be in uniform, but no one wants to be out of work.

**D: **Of course, of course. I'm always happy when I'm able to be the image of congeniality.

**H: **[PAUSE] But…

**D: **But, as the image of congeniality, I'd like you to be congenial as well, Simon.

**H: **Ah.

**D: **I'd like to put an end to this…organizational labyrinth…over SOLDIER itself. As you said, SOLDIER is in uniform, and was created, by the company, as an elite paramilitary force within the regular army. But SOLDIER is not just another unit, like your Presidential Guard Battalion.

**H: **So that's what this is all about, isn't it? [PAUSE] Lazar.

**Lazar: **[SMOOTHLY] Yes, it is.

**H: **You need our helicopters and trucks. It wouldn't be very [COUGH] very seemly for SOLDIER to concern itself with petty matters of logistics and supply lines, would it? And the company has better things to do or just doesn't see much profit in it.

**L: **[SUPRESSING LAUGHTER] I…suppose they've left it to the military for that reason. I'm not too proud to acknowledge SOLDIER's reliance on the regular military. I just don't want any interference, any further interference, from the army on those in SOLDIER deployed to Wutai. [PAUSE] But otherwise, the military is certain indispensable.

**H: **No. We're not indispensable. We're landscape.

**L: **Excuse me?

**H: **Look at me, Lazar. [PAUSE] I'm an old man. I won't be here for much longer. I'm the definition of dispensable. I'm a brick. There's a hundred thousand of me in the in the Midgar and Junon armies. One brick crumbles to bits, another takes it place, and the wall stays where it is. That's what the military is, you see, a wall. It survived the whole hundred years war, just standing there. Landscape. And as long as the trains run on time and the reactors aren't sabotaged and the Wutaians don't murder us in our sleep, no one cares. But the landscape doesn't change. [PAUSE] Don't patronize me, son. I'm not Marshal Heidegger, and I'm not Department Head Cassini.

**L: **Colonel Heidzig, I…

**H: **I know your story, Lazar. You grew up poor. The difference is, you were only in the slums until your teens. I grew up in the ruined world of the Hundred Years War. I was poor for forty years. And I'll tell you what I think. I think SOLDIER's day is done. Take it from an old man more than three times your age. [PAUSE] You've been put in charge of an anachronism, because that's what SOLDIER is. Dashing warriors fighting with swords and magic. Childhood heroes from a terrible age no one wants to remember. That day is over. So unless you want to patrol the slums and run the trains, I wouldn't take the future for granted. [LAUGHTER] Maybe SOLDIER should become President Shinra's bodyguard.

**L: **Maybe we should. The Turks wouldn't appreciate it though, would they? [LAUGHTER] When SOLDIER has defeated Wutai, we'll hunt monsters. There's no shortage of those Mako reactor across both continents. And when the monsters are all gone [PAUSE] Well, I suppose we'll have to find something else that makes up indispensable. You know, I'm not only thinking of my position. I intend to do this job as competently as I can. And if the military's alleged alternative to SOLDIER is actually better for the company, then I won't stand in the way, Simon.

**H: **[FORCED COUGH]

**L: **Simon?

**H: **I don't believe you, Lazar. SOLDIER is a Shinra's nest of monsters, so why should I? [PAUSE] Of course, what do I know? I'm just an old man with three metal stars on either shoulder. I probably don't know half of you've learned about SOLDIER since your appointment as Director of Emergency Services under Military Affairs. All those terrible secrets.

**L: **Would you like to know them?

**H: **[DIFFICULT LAUGHTER] Oh, god no.

[STOP]

The dead air that followed caught her off guard, and it took her a few seconds to realize that Simon Heidzig had deliberately stopped recording at that point._ Lazar? Have I heard that name before? _Shinra's Emergency Services Department was a cover name for SOLDIER, or the part of SOLDIER that wasn't in the New Midgar Army or in Junon. The distinction was still fuzzy all these years later. But she, de facto head of intelligence at the W.R.O., had never heard of it having a formal director, someone personally appointed by President Shinra himself as all directors and department heads were.

_So who was Lazar? _Removing the headphones, her hands wandered towards the contents of the other box, stopping at the three rolls of film. _I could confiscate these. Actually, I could confiscate all of this. And that's assuming Io even noticed. I might be giving him too much credit. _

Her gripped tightened on the tape player. _So, then I should take it, obviously. Because I'm not some criminal. I'm an official of the World Regenesis Organization, goshdarnit! _

She'd ejected the minicasette and was holding it in her left hand, between her thumb and index fingers, staring intently at the dull paper label on the side of its cheap plastic, like she was waiting for it to object.

_Damn it. _Frowning, she dropped the minicasette back into the box and loaded another one into MCC-610. She could sleep some other time. "Geeze, Tifa, you couldn't have given me one of these things?" she asked herself, putting her headphones back on.

She spent another two hours playing and replaying the Heidzig's tapes, when the sun starting to peek over the rolling hills outside Kalm. Yuffie then meticulously replaced the contents of both boxes, making a mental note to decide what would happen to the contents of Simon Heidzig's safe at some to-be-determined point in the future. She had plenty else on her mind in the meantime.

_The destruction of what we thought was Old Kalm. SOLDIER's curtain call after the surrender of Wutai at the end of the war. The Army Group Midgar, the New Midgar Army, and the Junon Army. Junon and Deepground. Junon and Wutai. _

At the bottom of the stairway, instinct made her look around in the darkness, as though she was expecting something besides old furniture under white sheets and shifts of faint light pouring through cracks in the blinds.

_Simon Heidzig and Victor Io._

She silently slipped through the kitchen door, only to almost give in to a fit of coughing. The sulfuric Kalm smog had returned, practically blindsiding her. She immediately drew her mask over her face, crossed out of the Heidzig House's small square lot, and into the cover provided by one of Kalm's white-and-red telephone boxes, where the air was marginally better.

Coughing, she took out her PHS and used the redial function—she hadn't been calling anyone else in her time here. _Maybe I should let Tifa and Cloud know how I'm doing. _As usual, someone from August Fitzroy's staff on the midnight shift answered quickly. "Yuffie Kisaragi again. Sorry, I know it's later than usual. Or earlier. Whatever."

An understanding response. "Listen, I got a couple things, but can we start with a general search for anyone with the given name 'Lazar' among Shinra's directors or department heads? This would've been during the last war. If it helps, he was probably in his twenties or early thirties, and from Midgar originally?" A question. "Yes, probably, but I don't know what sector."

Another response. "Thanks, I'll wait." She tried to take a more comfortable posture inside the glass-lined telephone box, propping her back against the door and resting her free hand against the brushed metal public telephone set, also made by Shinra. _Like everything everywhere. _

"_Boss, are you there?_" a different voice asked.

"August? Geeze, I hope they didn't wake you up for this."

"_Nah, I didn't actually want to sleep._" She heard him yawn. "_Actually, I wanted to tell you, we weren't having much luck learning…what we don't know…about Shinra's destruction of Old and possible New Kalm._"

"Don't worry about it, I know it's a long shot." _Maybe I need to just go and start asking people where they were ten years ago. 'Cause that worked so good for Nibelheim. _"So, this Lazar guy?"

His tone shifted distinctly towards pride. "_Better luck with that. How does Lazard Deusericus, Shinra's Director of Emergency Services for the New Midgar Army sound?_"

"That's a mouthful!" she replied excitedly, managing to keep the smug satisfaction out of her voice.

"_I know. We got his appointment to that position, fifth of March, 1999, from the President's Office. Doesn't say when it ended, guess that was a separate document, or maybe he held that post until SOLDIER was dissolved._"

The image of the tall blonde in black leather flashed before her mind. _About that. _"Anything else?"

"_Surprisingly little, especially compared the files on Heidegger and Scarlett. And the chairman himself, course. Really, according to HQ the whole SOLDIER database is full of holes, which I guess isn't surprising considering what happened with Deepground_," he confessed.

Her expression changed. "Then give me a guess, can you do that?"

"_SOLDIER was formally part of the military. So it's possible anything on Lazard Deusericus was filed accordingly, in which case…_"

"Let me guess—the records are either sitting in Midgar, in the ruins of the Shinra Building, or they were evacuated with the rest of the military, are in Junon."

"_Yes ma'am._"

She held back a sigh. _I need to go to Junon. The old man would say the same, I bet. _She really didn't want to go to Junon, in fact, she'd avoided being publicly scene in Junon since before Meteorfall. Another thought occurred to her. "And speaking of Junon, and I caught some of the highlights of Albert's late night sparring with their boys," she told him, referring to the earlier TV program.

"_Oh really? What'd you think, ma'am?_"

"Tell him to stay away from the c-word, or it'll make problems for me and Reeve, and one of us will make problems for him, you know?" she asked threateningly.

"_Yes ma'am._"

By the time she finished, the smog was beginning to seep into the telephone box regardless. Mask over her mouth, she returned to the Heidzig House directly, a little more carelessly kicking off her boots as she pondered her situation. _So, I could go back to August Fitzroy and keep trying here in Kalm. Or I can do the least pleasant thing, and go to the one place on Earth where the Reeve Tuesti's authority doesn't reach, where AVALANCHE aren't heroes and Wutai war is remembered. _She grimaced in the dark at the options. Even framing them in those terms didn't help.

"Or you could go back to Doofus Shinra and ask for more help," she told herself aloud, before breaking out in short laughter. President Shinra's unflattering nickname among his detractors, from the first year after Meteorfall, never failed to get a laugh out of her. No one used it now, of course. The man had gone from a ghostly rumor to something worse. There were no more jokes to be told.

_Simon Heidzig and Victor Io. Lazard Deusericus and Rufus Shinra. Bugenhagen and Fuhito. _All old or at least older men, and more and more an impenetrable barrier between her and what she was searching for. "So if the military didn't particularly like SOLDIER, or the Turks, who did they like? What was that they wanted?" she asked herself softly, recalling the tape.

"The military doesn't know what it wants. It never did."

Yuffie nearly jumped out of her shoes and spun backwards. At the other end of the room, Victor Io was still sitting in his chair, asleep, boots sticking out from underneath the colorful plaid blanket that was beginning to slide down his shoulders. He mumbled something further under his breath before his head shifted and his breathing grew shorter.

_Goshdarnit. _She never remembered being so startled by someone who was so generally unawake. With quiet steps, she approached him and pulled the blanket back up, very carefully brushing his cleanshaven cheek with one hand. _Geeze, how are you still this cold? _She rolled her eyes.

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_To begin: I'd like this chapter to be shorter. I hope the next chapter will be shorter. I say that for practically all my stories, and it's a problem. Hopefully it's actually not a problem for the reader, and just an organizational and effort problem for me, but I can't determine that without feedback. _

_With that out of the way: more _Crisis Core _(I suppose the absence of that title is conspicuous given the subject matter, we've gone this whole story without a single mention of Zack and barely any discussion of Sephiroth). The game itself is arguably less "problematic" than _Dirge of Cerberus _was for the reasons detailed earlier, though it's not without its own issues. On a similar topic, as if anyone cared, I won't be purchasing and playing the _Final Fantasy VII: Remake (Part 1) _for a few reasons, though I've largely familiarized myself with the plot direction (and plot changes). I can imagine some might find that odd, especially with much of North America under self-quarantine leaving it a very good time to play video games more generally. For the curious: even before the game launched, I was holding off due to watching my expenses, not wanting to play it on Playstation 4 (technical considerations), and my own suspicion of Square-Enix actually finishing the all the parts after this long of troubled development. The usual reasons that won't matter in the least to others. _

_With that in mind, I am grateful to anyone who's still reading, and do hope you'll consider leaving feedback to let me know you're there, and are staying safe depending on the current quarantine conditions in your place of residence (there's a a sentence that won't age well). _


	10. The Western Road

**The Western Road. **Yuffie thought about the dead. She thought about Lieutenant Colonel Heidzig, dead for a since before εуλ 0001, the little evidence of his existence consisting of a box of cassette tapes and a particularly somber painting of him in his scarlet military uniform. She thought about President Shinra, the mononymous founder of wartime arsenal that became the Shinra Corporation, and whose surviving issue was still the richest man in the world. And she thought about Sephiroth, or "Sephiroth of Nibelheim" as the W.R.O.'s classified records called him, another mononymous actor of Shinra.

Among other things, the cassettes confirmed something she'd speculated about since Victor Io told his story: Simon Heidzig had known Sephiroth.

_A shame he's not around_, she thought. _Well, according to Victor Io. Though one sickly old man probably wouldn't be such a danger today. _

Really, everyone who'd known Sephiroth—in the old days, unlike Cloud Strife—was dead. The elite cohort of SOLDIER, 1st Class, in service to the Peace Preservation had been wiped out during and after the Wutai War. The younger SOLDIER, 2nd Class and 3rd Class, that replaced them, which included the first women inducted into SOLDIER and what would become the Deepground Army, were not as acquainted: most barely knew Sephiroth, and many never met him prior to his disappearance in September εуλ 0002, when Nibelheim was destroyed. If he were still around, Heidzig might be invaluable for that alone.

_People who knew Sephiroth, even only in passing, tend to be dead. Eye witness accounts are accordingly rare. _

The same, she suspected, was true about Victor Io.

The old man—it was hard to believe that Heidzig would've been twenty years his senior—was lying in an uncovered couch, his gardening boots removed, almost comically pale feet sticking out from underneath a blanket.

"Well, even if the occasional cigarette isn't bad for you, the fevers must be," Victor groaned, shaking. "You think I would've learned by now."

"This happen before?" she asked distantly, sitting backwards in a nearby chair, chin resting on her arms.

"At my age, everything has happened before." He visibly stifled a cough, emitting a soft grunt. "It comes and goes. Maybe it's the climate in Kalm."

_Does the climate in Kalm cause you to lose feeling in your limbs?_ She scanned him head to feet. "I don't think it's contagious."

"Oh, I'm sure it isn't, Ms. Kisaragi," he assured her quickly.

"I'm saying this because when I leave, I don't want you to think it's because of that," she explained in monotone.

"I know." She felt like he was almost mocking her now. "All the young people are leaving Kalm, they always have been. You're in good company."

To her surprise, he leaned forward on the couch as if trying to stand up. "I remember when the Cassini Boys left down the street, a few weeks after Meteorfall. You see, they were both…"

"Hey!" she snapped, reaching out to hold him down. It took surprisingly little effort given his height. "I didn't ask you about your neighbors. I can't believe I'm saying this, but you need to get enough sleep," she told him stiffly. "You probably need to eat more protein, and you need to stop _this _until it at least your fever clears," she chided him, brandishing an open cigarette pack in one hand.

"Yes ma'am," he replied dryly, shifting under the sheets.

"I mean, I know you're old and all, but this," she pointed at him generally, "…isn't normal. You shouldn't even go outside for your stupid groundskeeping routine, much less be smoking." She doubted it was Geostigma. Some of the symptoms matched, as they manifested in the elderly like Reeve's mother, but others didn't. On top of that, there hadn't been any reported new cases of Geostigma in more than a year. _Whatever's wrong with him, it's not that._

Victor cleared his throat with a dry cough. "That's going to complicate things," he pointed out.

"Yeah, so I want you to take this." Reaching for the nearby sitting table, she opened a cardboard box, flipped over the paper inserts over the protective plastic bag, and presented him with a PHS, the same model as hers, a P900iV. After she unwrapped it from the plastic, Victor's eyes filled with awareness and irritation.

"I don't really want a telephone," he complained softly.

"Too bad." She unfolded the clamshell plastic structure and held it in front of him. "It's new old stock, it even has a built-in camera."

"Great," he said, taking it from her finally and holding it in his wrinkled hands carefully.

"And I know you're not going to like this because it doesn't jive with this whole…hermit thing…you're doing, but I've also ordered W.R.O. hospice staff to provide you with in-home care. Just until the fever passes," she told him.

Victor Io seemed to immediately become more alert, even jolting upright and pushing aside his blanket. "I must really object to that…"

"Hey, what did I just say? Get back down!" she barked, immediately causing the old man to shrink back into the couch. "You want that fever to get better or what?"

Victor only responded with a grunt, and she continued. "I'll set up regular wellness visits. If you're so paranoid that the Kalmish will come and lynch you or something, we can schedule them at night. Happy?"

He shook his head before easing further down below his blanket. "So where you will go? Junon?"

"Eventually. It's not exactly a bus ride down the highway from Edge." She crossed her long legs the dining room chair she'd pulled up to the couch, and her arms over her chest. "You were born in Junon, weren't you?"

"Not the fortress, but yes," he muttered more quietly. "Those who couldn't make it into the city before Wutai came had to flee the Junon Marches. My village was relocated to the Midgar Basin when I was a boy."

"So you don't have any family in Junon now?"

"No one who would remember me, I'm sure. Back then, no one really came from anywhere." Yuffie watched his breathing slow in pace as he sank down into the old couch. "But that's ancient history. They called it the Hundred Years War for a reason. You should go to Junon, there are…records, tapes, not like the miniscule collection I have here. More than a lifetime in the Midgar ruins could hope to salvage."

He opened his dark, almost pit-like eyes again, wide as he could manage, replacing his usual squint. "History lives in Junon, and Junon alone."

"Shinra's history at least," she muttered back as his eyes closed again. _Which is the kind of history I'm interested in, after all._

"Shinra's history," he muttered. "That skinny, blonde-haired grease jockey in his blue boiler suit who hitched his wagon to the Grand Army of Midgar. Back then, no one knew he'd be making history."

Yuffie stared at him. "Dead now. Or you could ask him, I suppose. Heidzig would've known," he muttered sleepily. "He knew Shinra. Knew him when he was a boy."

He almost rolled over and out of the couch, before Yuffie reached out and propped him with an arm. "He's even in that old photo with Shinra."

"What photo?" she asked.

"The photo of the founders. He's there. Back row, in the uniform, couldn't miss him." Victor sighed deeply. "He didn't work for the company back then, of course. He was an outsider like the rest of us. But he was there, keeping an eye on them. He had orders. If you wanted to know about Shinra, you should ask…him," he told her as he dozed off.

She stared at him, the skinny, bony geriatric, his gaunt face with its angular brow and wrinkled eyelids under a thinning mop of straight, ash-colored hair. No matter how long she studied him, she couldn't picture him as a young man, even the age of the soldiers and officers at Healen.

_You're useless, you know that? _Reaching down, she took one right hand that had slid over the edge of the couch, replacing it under the sheets. She did the same to right leg, feeling a fragile femur through what scraps of flesh were still there. Delicately, she brushed grey-white hair off his wrinkled forehead so he might look half-presentable.

_What good is an old soldier like you? _She resisted the urge to laugh at him, and wondered if he was asleep. He must've been by now. Somehow, twelve or more hours of sleep were inadequate for the old man.

With a smirk, she tested her assumption, bent down and kissed his dry, pale forehead. If he was awake, he made no response, his breathing unchanged. _I thought so. _"We'll speak again when you're better." She gave him a sad smile. "You probably never even heard of Jenova anyway."

Rather than deal with the hassle of one of Kalm's public phones and their inadequate protection from the coal smog, Yuffie chose the basement of the Kalm Library, in sight of the ever-helpful August, to make the call to another former member of AVALANCHE, one that was long overdue. She half-considered recording it—she wouldn't even need her own tape recorder to do it, the Kalm Directory had more than sufficient technology for that.

"_Hey Yuffie! How's the world's greatest ninja?_" Barret Wallace asked with way too much enthusiasm. She decided against it; Barret hadn't been an employee of Shinra since before he lost his right arm, what interview him?

"Hi Barret, listen, I'll try and be quick…" she began, headset propped on her shoulder.

"_Where you at, anyway?_" he asked, ignoring her.

"Oh. Kalm, Kalm City."

"_Oh, geeze. Sorry about, kiddo. Don't forget to wear your mask._" He almost chuckled there.

"You know about that?" She was surprised.

"_Yuffie, I lived in Corel for thirty years. I was born and raised in a coal town. I think I fu-…freaking know something about what it does to the air quality. And Kalm's powerplant was built in the worse possible place, not that there were many options._" Barret was clearly on a roll. "_I mean, sure, there's been improvements to the technology since before Shinra's time, but the W.R.O.'s trying to cut costs where they can and…_"

"Okay, Mr. Coal Town, if you're such an expert—how the heck is the air in Kalm after three years worse than Midgar's after twenty?" Yuffie snapped. "Or is that just 'cost-cutting'?"

Barret took on a scholarly tone. "_Oh, that. Well, it's just how coal works. It's always been dirtier than mako, that's how Shinra sold it in the first place. Oil too. Technically, the exhaust from a mako reactor's way cleaner than any coal-fire chimney, it's only dangerous in ridiculously high concentrations. That's why you can stand in the actual reaction chamber inside a mako reactor and not get sick, and it only dissipates further in the open air. Mako's toxic in its pure, liquid form. Coal dust, on the other hand, just tears apart your lungs, and even if you burn it, sulfur dioxide is acidic in any kind of moisture,_" he explained, as if it were common knowledge.

"And this is the bright, shiny future of hope you're promising?" she accused him. She knew the basics: as Fuhito's insane ramblings had outlined in his manifesto, coal presented a climatological problem in the long term, but mining and burning every ounce of it in the world would mean nothing to the Planet's Lifestream—it would just mean no more coal, among other things.

"_Well, I think of myself as more of an oil and natural gas man presently_," he said, a hint of defensiveness in his voice. "_Just so happens that Junon's got a stranglehold on the offshore drilling in the middle sea, and their half of the Midgar Mountains, and the Zapada Peninsula, and Costa del Sol, and_…"

"Yeah, I get the picture, thanks." She sighed. "I was calling you about that, actually. Do you have any reliable contacts in Junon? In energy production or anything?"

Barret audibly hummed to himself. "_Wow. I gotta' tell you, Yuffie, they're all pricks. And not like the pricks I work with in the oil and gas department at the W.R.O., I mean real a-holes._" She heard him sigh. "_Well, there is one: Aske._"

"I _am_ asking, Barret."

"_No, Aske, that's his name. Some dude in Junon's Ministry of Petrochemical Industry or something, but he's always been helpful. Especially considering I've never met him in person, which is why I think he's in the government, or maybe the military_."

"Barret, that sounds incredibly shady," she muttered distastefully.

"_Weren't you a material thief before we met you?_" he reminded her skeptically.

"This isn't about me, Barret, it's about your weird friend."

"_I know, I know! But he's always come through for me, one-hundred-percent of the time. Real stand-up dude, even if he sounds weird. You're Reeve's spymaster, you can probably figure out who the hell he really is._"

_Don't count on that. _The New State of Junon was uniquely impenetrable to the W.R.O., and had been since its declaration around the time the W.R.O. was founded. What the world knew about Junon, Junon let it know. It was such a problem that, at some point, most in the W.R.O. had just given up and started pretending Junon, on the whole, didn't exist. Cloud and Tifa acted like it didn't to be sure. _I've been saying for years, we need to get to the migrants, tourists, and expats. Before Junon realizes that free travel across the border is where they're vulnerable and shuts it down. _She hated foreign policy, but Reeve wasn't particularly masterful at it either.

"Well, it's better than what we're working with over here," she muttered, giving August Fitzroy a glance—the young man looked offended by the remark. "How'd you normally reach him?"

"_Through a phone number in the ministry. I'll text you the number I use. They'll see you coming though,_" Barret pointed out.

Yuffie smirked. "Oh, they'll see me coming a mile away. There's no point hiding it, didn't Tifa and Cloud tell you? I've already spoken to Rufus."

"_Yeah, about that._" There was an uncomfortable pause. This is where Yuffie expected the old Barret, bellowing and full of bluster, to come barreling back, but he didn't.

She grew suspicious. "What did Rufus tell you?" she asked accusingly.

"_Nothing! Rufus doesn't tell me sh-…his accountants, on the other hand_," he stumbled before trying again. "_His Excellency the President Doofus Shinra is of the opinion that our negotiations with Junon are a waste of time for everyone. That all the gil he's giving us for exploratory drilling ought to be going to the Knowlespole expedition_."

"Didn't that used to be your opinion?" _Oh, gawd, I'm actually paying attention to Barret_, she thought.

"_Well, yeah, it was. But none of that's gonna' matter until Icicle Township agrees to sign over the rights._"

"Yeah, I can kind of understand why Icicle Lodge might object to their backyard becoming the world's biggest oil field," she speculated.

"_Well, I don't concern myself with that political sh-…stuff._"

She rolled her eyes at the handset. "That must be nice."

"_You know what your problem is, Yuffie? You don't let things go. Me? I'm a good soldier in this war for fuel—I'll go where the W.R.O. sends me, and so will the rest of my boys. And if the W.R.O. couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a map, well, nobody's perfect, right?_"

She began to disbelieve she was actually having this conversation with Barret Wallace, the survivor of Shinra's razing of Corel in the wake of the alleged sabotaging of the township's reactor. "Listen, Barret, it's been real nice, but I gotta'…"

"_Yeah, yeah, I know_." Barret sounded like he'd belatedly heard himself and was embarrassed. "_Hey, if you _do _get hold of Aske—ask him about Junon's Clean Air Development Plan._"

"What's that?"

"_I dunno, that's why I said ask him. I know it's been around for a year or two, but not what it's about. If I had to guess, I'd say liquefied natural gas, seeing how it's Junon and all." _A pause._"You see, Yuffie, when you take fossil gas—ethane and methane mostly—and liquefy it, the process removes certain harmful substances and pollutants. When burned, that means we get lower carbon-dioxide emissions by heat produced, not just lower than coal but diesel fuel and…_" he explained.

"Oh, gawd, Barret! Spare me, would you?" she snapped into the handset.

"_Fine, fine. Just thought you might wanna' educate yourself or something. Not like you ever went to school_," he grumbled. "_Some interviewer you're gonna' be._"

A thought entered her mind, and annoyance was replaced by anxiety. "Actually, Barret, I wanted to ask…"

"_What is it?_"

_Fuhito_, she almost asked him. The original Avalanche Insurgency, the sabotage of the Corel Reactor and Shinra's punitive destruction of the town in response, everything else. "Uh…Tell Marlene I miss her, okay? I didn't get to see her when I was in Edge."

"_Oh._" Barret sounded surprised. "_Uh, sure. I'll let her know, I'm sure she misses her Aunt Yuffie too._"

"_And thanks for your help_," she forced herself to say. In the corner of her eye, she could see August holding back laughter. "_I guess I don't say that enough._"

Barret almost sounded taken aback. "_Sure, Yuffie, any time. You know we all got your back._"

_Please, god, let this conversation end finally. _She was about to hang up when he started shouting "_Wait, wait! One last thing, Yuffie…uh, did he do it?_"

She thought of Fuhito again before shaking her head. "Who?"

"_Hart! Did he do it?_"

She scowled at August and turned away. "Come on, Barret, you know I can't talk about an ongoing investigation!"

"_Okay, okay, just curious_," he replied innocently.

"Goodbye, Barret!"

"_Oh, and if you see your dad, can you thank him for…_" Barret's tinny voice terminated when she slammed the handset down and turned back to August.

"Wipe that smile off your face," she ordered him.

"Mr. Wallace is always quite a character. And very knowledgeable too."

"Why don't you shut up and call our ambassador to Junon?" she snapped, practically waving her hands over her head in exasperation. _If I wanted to work with a bunch of jerks, I'd go work for Rufus Shinra. _

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_After some delay, and some turbulent events in my own life (ugh), a somewhat shorter chapter (what I think is a good length, given my problem with running on too long in my other stories), along with the first appearance of none other then Barret Wallace. Truth be told, I was never terribly fond of AVALANCHE's leader, possibly because he was just that? Barret Wallace, working-class oil and coal expeditionary, on the other hand is a joy to write (though possibly comes off as irreverently comical, which I have to hope is offset by Yuffie's general unpleasant attitude). All things remaining the same, I have something different, and interesting, planned for the next chapter, which is mostly completed (I think I'm saying that every chapter at this point), so as always please let me know if you're reading, your thoughts and other feedback. _


	11. ACT II - JUNON

_**Preamble: **_

_The material proceeding this, following "The Interview", is now Act I - KALM.  
_

* * *

**ACT II**

**JUNON**

In dimly-lit offices of the Junon Admiralty Board, they lingered silently. Except for one of the men, a newcomer in a characteristic scarlet greatcoat made famous by the Midgar Army, they wore the black and white wool uniforms of the Junon Navy, tunics over blouses and ties, peaked visor caps sitting on the table between them.

A low-ranking junior officer took the thirteen centimeter reel of 4.6-milimeter audio tape from the army officer and meticulously loaded it into the bulky RT-909 open reel player in an open cabinet along the wall, carefully spooling the magnetic tape into the non-Shinra brushed-metal machine.

"She couldn't have picked a more obsolete media format?" one naval officer asked loudly, leaning towards a superior sitting at the end of the table, wearing a black double-breasted tunic with the three large stars of a Junon vice admiral on his epaulets. The admiral shushed him before returning to his visor cap in his hands.

"What was her name again, Godo Kisaragi's daughter?" another, significantly older admiral asked.

"Yuffie, Yuffie Kisaragi," the sitting vice admiral explained softly.

"And this was all the work she'd done?" the most elderly officer in the room asked, leaning in his direction.

"We don't believe so, we think she copied this tape from another." The vice admiral glanced at the man at the reel-to-reel who gave a nod. "There's only a few minutes of her conversation with the major here."

[START]

**Kisaragi: **If this Fuhito character was such a big deal, why haven't I ever heard of him?

**Io: **You'd have to ask the Turks. Fortunately for you, they're still around [LAUGH] so that's possible, especially for someone such as yourself. [PAUSE] Maybe he wasn't such a big deal. After all, he didn't succeed and you, a member of AVALANCHE, had never heard of him.

**K: **You know, there's a lot of things I bet you've never heard of.

**I: **Why bet against a sure thing? The older I get, the more I wish I knew less about more things. I've settled for not being able to do anything about them from here, in relative obscurity.

**K: **Sounds kind of cowardly, no offense.

**I: **None taken. You might want to follow my advice, even, if you have that luxury. [SIGH] But you chose to life of duty, didn't you? I don't know what you did before AVALANCHE, but you could've left after Shinra's fall, couldn't you have?

**K: **That's [PAUSE] a complicated question.

**I: **I'm sorry to hear that. And I'm sorry you've decided to take this task yourself. You don't need to be my age, to see what I've seen, to realize what a terrible thing knowledge becomes when you have enough of it.

**K: **[ABRUPT LAUGHTER] Well that just sounds stupid.

**I: **I wish it was.

**K: **You think I'll learn something I won't like?

**I: **Honestly, I can't even fathom what you'll learn. But I know this: Shinra grew rich not from guns or from mako, but ideas. And like they say, money is the root of all evil.

[STOP]

From the end of the table, the vice admiral gestured, and a junior officer reached forward and struck the switch, stopping the spinning reels on the player. The other officers sat in silence, eyes wandering among each other, waiting for what came next.

With great deliberateness, he rose from the table. Some of the others leaned towards the door, only to stumble when the vice admiral grasped his white-crowned visor cap and held it against his black uniform tunic, lowering his eyes in respect. The man in the army uniform imitated him, lowering his own hat, and the other officers followed suit. One navy man belated realized he had no cap to doff and instead kept his hands by his side. The sailors stood at attention.

"And that's all that was on the tape?" he asked, without raising his eyes.

"Yes sir."

"Victor Io was a legend in the New Midgar Army. He served honorably and with distinction in three wars. He might've liked to talk too much," the army man explained quietly.

"And we will never see his kind again," the vice admiral waxed in response. There was a murmur in agreement from the others. The moment of silence endured a few moments longer before he raised his arm and placed his cap on his head. The junior officer stepped towards the wall and flipped a switch, raising the electric blinds: the setting sun over the Mediterranean Ocean flooded into the office.

"On more pressing matters, the foreign ministry's talks with the W.R.O. foreign office have finished. They were as unproductive as expected." The younger admiral rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. "There will be no negotiation on our disputed territorial claims, especially with Gongaga's withdrawal of South Sea claims, thereby…" By then, he had become acutely aware of the increasingly panicked expressions on the men facing him and the windows, as one gestured past him and shouted a warning.

A large pane of glass his right shattered, showering fragments across the table and hardwood floor beneath them. The vice admiral was more than shocked; he barely managed to prop himself on the table when Yuffie Kisaragi, having entered through the space the window had occupied, took him by the lapels of his uniform.

The room was immediately filled with panicked shouting. The doors slammed open and four rifle-armed sailors poured in, rifles raised. Yuffie glanced at the closest one and with subtle flick of her wrist, angled the massive shuriken previously holstered on her back at him, just as he squeezed the trigger. The shuriken deflected his shot, sending it back into his right leg and dropping him.

"Lower your weapons!" the vice admiral stammered them. "You're not going to stop her with bolt-action rifles!"

Impatient with their response, Yuffie holstered her gigantic shuriken with one arm and used her other to fling a trio of smaller blades into the two sailors behind them. After the cries in pain, the fourth sailor seemed to get the message and lowered his weapon's barrel, and she turned back to him.

"Listen, Admiral Kiss-ass. No more pretty words, no more mind games. I'm going to ask a question, and you're going to answer it, and your best buddy Rufus isn't here to save you."

"And you're sure you don't want this on tape?" he stammered with a terrified grin, still trying to free himself from her grasp.

"Off the record!" she growled. He beckoned her to continue with a manic nod. "What is it, this new weapon? What did Shinra give you? What did it take them three years to finish? What was the Midgar Army going to use to end the Hundred Years War before Shinra stepped in?"

The smile faded from his face, only to be replaced by awkward chortling that turned into outright laughter.

"A weapon? You think this is about some weapon?"

Yuffie swore loudly. "Excuse me! I mean, don't fu-…freak with me, Kessler!" she snapped, dragging him off the glass-covered table before shoving him against one of the remaining window panes.

"You really do! So the White Rose of Wutai is living in the past and doesn't even realize it." Vice Admiral Kessler cried in pain when she shoved him back again, cracking the glass. "You want to know what Shinra gave us? It's been in front of you this whole time. Just look with your own eyes!" he shouted, gesturing awkwardly behind himself.

Resisting the urge to close her hands together around his neck, she glanced over the black wool and golden cloth epaulet on Kessler's shoulder. Behind him stretched Junon Harbor, occupied by one of the two identical flagships of the Junon Navy.

"Shinra didn't grow rich from guns. Shinra grew rich from _power_. And that's literal, not metaphorical, Ms. Kisaragi!" Kessler gloated.

She looked back at him, unable to hide the confusion in his face. "A…ship? But you already had those ships!"

"You don't get it, do you? This isn't the Mako Age anymore, it's the Information Age! And what is the truth of the Information Age?" He struggled to lean towards her. "Victor Io was wrong. _Knowledge_ is the root of evil," he whispered.

* * *

_**Author's Note:**_

_I'd like say I completed this chapter in record time, but aside from being very short (that's something other people do, so why not me?), it was also almost completely written earlier, though it needed substantial modification. I'm also trying something new, in case it wasn't obviously apparent: just like how this story (unintentionally) began with a prolepsis ("flash forward"), so will this new act. I've been using this story as a way to experiment, though I'm prepared for not all experiments working (feedback is useful for letting me know what works and what doesn't). There will probably be a decent gap between this and the next chapter, appropriately. _


	12. Under Junon

**Under Junon. **"_In more recent news, the flagship of the Junon Navy arrived in port in Erujunon to celebrating crowds. The JNS _Midgar_, at over two hundred meters long and weighing more than thirty-two thousand tonnes, is one of the two _Midgar-_class battleships launched by the Confederation in the second half of the Hundred Years War, also known as the First Wutai World War. With the collapse of Shinra, the _Midgar _and her sister ship the _Junon, _are second in length only to the Junon Air Force's airship _Highwind _and the W.R.O.'s airborne command ship the _Sierra, _decommissioned since Battle of Midgar._"

_Pops won't like that_, Yuffie Kisaragi thought at the radio broadcast's use of official name given by the W.R.O.'s military office to Cid Highwind's airship that had been sunk by the Deepground Army. The old man insisted on naming it after his wife, Shera, which the W.R.O., and Shera herself, emphatically refused. Officially, it was named the _Sierra_.

"_Despite its successful circumnavigation of the world, it's believed the _Midgar _has been recalled to its home port for urgently needed repairs. The _Junon, _a year younger than the _Midgar_, was damage in engagements with the Weapon creatures during the Sephiroth Crisis three years ago, and has spent more time in laid up for repairs than at sea since the fall of Shinra. Though the Junon government claims they will eventually relaunch the battleship bearing the city-state's name, rumors abound that the _Junon _will likely be cannibalized for spare parts for its operational predecessor and for Junon's post-Shinra naval buildup. In related news, calls for a new round of inspections…_"

"What a boring topic," Yuffie declared aloud before switching the controls to the radio set she was wearing. The compact headset crammed under her motorcycle helmet did a good job masking the sounds of riding a civilian dirt bike along what was left of the Midgar Highway, formerly the Midgar-Junon Expressway, which the Midgar-Kalm Highway split off from. Shinra had never completed it; what existed ran south through the Midgar Basin through a valley in the Midgar Mountains before reaching a tunnel completed during the war by means of forced labor. Shinra had hoped to expand it, and through the other side run the expressway south through the Junon Forest, then back northwest to the Junon Heights and the fortress city itself. Like many of Shinra's ambitious construction projects, it was never completed, the expressway occasionally turned back into ancient wartime roads. She didn't trust the tunnel itself either, but the alternative was a long, winding, and obviously dangerous pass up the Midgar Mountains and down the other side, the shortest crossing adding hours to the trip.

_Now Shinra wants to build a railroad where the expressway was going to be. Good luck with that_, she thought with a snort. As a north-facing cliff face of the Midgar Mountains loomed in front of her, she kept following the paved roadway south.

"How do you find the Junon Army?" "Just keep going down the highway." It was a joke that had begun circulating in the wake of Deepground's mass abductions starting in the outskirts of Junon, and the military's apparent inability to do anything about them. Except Junon hadn't been idle. Before the Battle of Midgar, they announced a new mass mobilization policy, the reintroduction of conscription for the first time since the dissolution of the Midgar Confederation. "In case the worse should happen," was their reasoning. After the W.R.O. prevailed over Deepground, they did not change policy.

"What could you do with a whole army in this day and age?" Reeve liked to ask. Unlike their navy, a ground-based force, even supported by the world's second-biggest air force, could not just wantonly claim territory across the continent. Junon found things other things to do. For starters, they patrolled the whole of the Midgar-Junon Expressway, as much was left of it. This allowed them to set the rather arbitrary tolls on trade coming out of Edge, which infuriated the actually rich people who lived in Edge, scarce as they were.

They also seized property formerly belonging to Shinra outside of Junon. They started with Fort Condor: the pre-Wutai War pathetic excuse for a castle that Shinra had strangely attempted to convert into a mako reactor. The slipshod job attracted a massive monster, resembling the grand condor of legend, and a number of anti-Shinra rebels. AVALANCHE ended up aiding the rebels against the equally bizarre mercenaries hired by Shinra to retake the fort, but that was all history now. The Junon Army showed up at the abandoned site and, per its agreement with the W.R.O., dismantled the reactor—and the rest of Fort Condor, including the empty condor nest.

Yuffie didn't understand the Fort Condor affair, not at first. She thought she did now: it demonstrated Junon's ability to build, and destroy, as it saw fit. In the year that followed, Junon effectively annexed the rest of the Fort Condor region, and then the whole of the Southern Plains, practically a third of the Eastern Continent south and west of the Midgar and Mythril Mountains, and east of the Junon Peninsula. And the W.R.O. did nothing. Reeve focused on protecting the independence of the Mideel Archipelago to the south, widely believed to be Junon's next target.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **So, basis for Junon's takeover of the whole region was legal, apparently. Junon has gotten really good at using the law to justify their scheming. After the end of the Wutaian occupation of the continent during the Hundred Years War, the Midgar Confederation claimed sovereignty over the entire continent. [PAUSE] After Shinra collapsed, the legal question was raised and Junon claimed, and was awarded, successorship as the surviving half of the Confederation state. No one seriously thought they'd actually press those claims. Maybe because we're all stupid. [PAUSE] I'm here at the north entrance to the MMBT. It's patrolled by the Junon Army, but mostly there's civilian drilling workers here.

**Nearby Speaker: **What're you doing?

[STOP]

With the heavy leather strap over one shoulder, Yuffie lowered the microphone she was holding in her free hand, the other keeping her motorcycle steady as she waited by the side of the road. The question was posed by a Junon soldier a dull blue uniform, a frown visible under his bulky white helmet, his long-barreled assault rifle slung rather leisurely over his shoulder.

"Nothing," she insisted, drawing her hand out from the leather case and opening and closing it, demonstrating that it was empty.

"Is that a tape recorder? Kind of big for a tape recorder."

"It's nothing. Shut up. I want to go through the tunnel."

"Pass?" The infantryman pointed at himself; on the various portions of white-colored composite armor worn over the blue battledress uniform, in the place of the dark red SEPC corporate logo was the bolder, bright red rectangular coat-of-arms of the State of Junon; under that were the words **JUNON STATE BORDER AND CUSTOMS SERVICE **in bold script. After another minute, she realized there was Wutaian inlaid in the coat-of-arms in a neat square: **国境警察**.

"Here," she told him, taking out her W.R.O.-issued passport. He stared at it through the glowing red photoreceptors in his helmet before handing it back to her. "All right, Ms. Yuffie Kisaragi. What business do you have in Junon?"

"I'm going to the city," she announced, as blatantly vague as she could manage. The infantryman frowned more under his helmet before gesturing at companion to join him.

"If you're journalist, I presume you have some credentials?"

"I might. But I'm not going to show them to you," she declared.

The first soldier looked irritated enough to cause a fuss when a voice bellowed from behind him in the direction of activity deeper into the tunnel. Yuffie was impressed by how loud it managed to be. "Hey, what're you two stopping up traffic for?"

The two soldiers exchanged looks, a comical sight with their matching helmets. "What traffic? It's the first time all day the traffic's let up," the second one muttered to the first indignantly. Towards the entrance, a middle-aged man in the dull-colored boiler suit and white helmet of some kind of labor foreman strolled up. There was something immediately off about him; after a few seconds, Yuffie realized that he was missing his left arm at the elbow underneath the suit. He did, however, have the red diamond of a Shinra Corporation subsidiary sewn over his breast.

"Well? You gonna' let her go are you gonna' send her on her way? Pick one!" he demanded gruffly. Yuffie suppressed her laughter as the second soldiers indicated via gesture how little trouble all of this was worth, and the first one conceded the point with a wave of his hands. Raising a leg off her motorcycle, she began to push it across the uneven transition into the tunnel.

"You know _real _customs and immigration ain't as easy as those boys," the foreman warned her grimly, his jaw clenched on his thin, roughly-shaven face.

"I know, I've been to the fortress before." Approaching him, she squinted at his clothing in the dim red-orange lights of the tunnel's entrance. _Shinra Mining and Exploration Company. What, the power company's too busy to dig for its own fuel? _Craning her head as she progressed, she looked over his back: visible deeper down the tunnel, section of walls on either side had their decades-old meticulously tiled walls torn down and what she assumed were crude exploration tunnels dug perpendicular to the pain tunnel with heavy machinery.

The foreman followed her eyes. "Sorry about the mess," he announced casually.

Pausing in front of him as she passed, she gave him a skeptical look. "What're guys digging up here, anyway? Coal?"

"What're going to Junon for?" he fired back.

"None of your business."

"Exactly," he said in agreement. "Now piss off, would you kindly?"

The exploration tunnels continued sporadically as she continued southwards, seeming to grow larger in size behind the obstructive metal screens put up in front of them as she got closer to the Junon end. The racket from both sides grating her nerves and causing her to speed up her pace as she pushed her motorcycle along. Predictably, there were more Junon Army on the other end of the tunnel, the same unremarkable young men in the unmistakable dark blue uniforms of the Peace Preservation, though these were joined by an officer in garb largely identical to the dark red coats and blue trousers worn by the military at Healen. Unlike on the Midgar side, the seemed to have no interest in her even as she passed, so she called out to them casually as she climbed back onto her motorcycle.

"You know, if you guys really want to ruin that tunnel, you should just get some explosives and be done with it."

This seemed to amuse the soldiers and their officer. "Hey, who says we won't?" he said with a rather bold grin quite unlike the tired, spent men at Healen. There was something about these Junon Army troops she didn't care for.

Traversing the better-maintained highway that cut through to the coastal plains along the Mediterranean on her motorcycle gave Yuffie time to think, and even time to record, the TC-5500 propped against her back as she leaned forward on the bike, and the microphone fixed to a loop on her vest.

[START]

**Kisaragi: **I never talked about it with Cloud or Barret or anyone else, like they would give a crap, but I used to dream about Junon when I was growing up. Those expensive tutors my father hired when I was growing up, Wutaian scholars, would tell me the approved story. Junon, the oldest city in the East, older then the cities whose names are forgotten and are just collectively called Midgar. It's not Old Junon. That fishing village we used to sneak into the fortress the first time, that's all that's left of the seaport city that was built on the ruins of the original villages, a thousand years ago, and the fortress was built on top of that. [PAUSE] Victor Io said that history lives in Junon. I don't know about living, but it's squashed underneath it. The city of the goddess Juno, or Jun as we call her in Wutai. Since Meteorfall, it might be the only real city that still exists in the world. The State of Junon acts that way, at least. [PAUSE] Since before Shinra, nothing seems to survive for long in the East. The Imperial City in Wutai is more than a thousand years old, I know that much. And if something did survive…

[STOP]

Feeling over her back and into the carrying case with one hand, she stopped the reel-to-reel. _And if it did survive, we probably destroyed it during the war. _Victor Io was wrong. History didn't live in Junon, just Shinra's short epoch. _Shinra buries history, or burns it down, or whatever they need to do to keep looking to the future. Suddenly, Rufus being an unhelpful jerk suddenly makes more sense, doesn't it? _

She felt her PHS vibrate in her breast pocket: she had cellular reception again. Not thinking of the microphone, with her other hand she produced her PHS and flipped open the screen, where there was a new text message waiting for her, from none other than Reeve Tuesti himself.

"Got your report, great find in Kalm. Hope you're as lucky in Junon, don't hesitate to reach out. Please ignore the calls for a new round of…inspections?! We need something to distract from Hart?!" She flipped her phone shut and almost swore. "God...goshdarnit!" She almost threw her phone in a fit of anger. She wasn't angry at the inspectors; in a way, they might've been the only people who took their jobs seriously in the whole of the World Regenesis Organization. She was angry at the farce that was about to follow.

The roadway eventually started to turn west, as she made her way deeper into the New State of Junon. The military activity grew similarly: Army Group Junon or the Junon Army or whatever they called themselves, traveling in convoys of large, tall 6x6 military trucks that would pass her on the road, visibly loaded with soldiers in uniform. Obviously there was no way to just enter Fortress Junon by land; that had been true three years ago, and it was even more true today: the small villages and refugee camps-turned-towns that ran along the bluffs immediately to the west, collectively called the Junon Heights or Arujunon, and the seaside towns that ran south to the secondary port city of Erujunon, and Junon Gulf to the north effectively encircled the city itself. Sometimes, the old ways were the best: she'd take the more-or-less same route she used immediately after she first joined AVALANCHE, cursing the spikey-haired weirdo, his big-breasted miniskirt-clad girlfriend, and their lumbering idiot of a boss for dragging her into Shinra's seaside fortress.

Yuffie resisted the urge to smile. It'd taken almost an hour, but following the highways in the direction of Erujunon only to break off and take the side roads back north, she was treated to the southern face of the tiered fortress city of New Junon, a massive steel ziggurat with a gradually rusting orange hue and terraces of concrete and pavement. She half expected to see the _Sister Ray_ pointing west. Beneath and below it, the dim lights of the Old Junon fishing villages, awkwardly sandwiched underneath the fortress and between it and Erujunon. Finally there came a perimeter fence with a clearly visible sign advertising the Junon Border and Customs Service, the coat-of-arms of the rectangular profile of the city in miniature, and approximate distances to New Junon, Erujunon, and the Heights.

Yuffie's motorcycle came to a halt just behind one of those Type 939 military trucks, a faded Shinra badge visible on the registration plate fixed to its enormous bumper. It was waved through Security Checkpoint Water Gate, as another sign indicated, and then it was her turn; a thin woman with neatly-cut dark hair, about her age, in a red Peace Preservation uniform with an old-fashion striped green-and-white armband gestured at her before glancing at her comrade, another woman in the nearby guard shack.

"Papers, please." The woman officer, a single small star rank insignia on her shoulders and collar indicating she was a 2nd lieutenant, asked almost exactly like her W.R.O. counterparts at the desk at Kalm. Reaching into one of her vests many pockets, she produced her identification and travel permit—as expected, the woman raised her passport book and compared the photo to Yuffie, who immediately replicated the inappropriately wide, toothy grin she knew she was sporting in that photograph, canines bared. She was satisfied by the similarity. "Reason for visiting Junon?"

"I'm a journalist out of Edge. Independent," she added quickly. Reaching over, she showed the contents of her traveling case to her, despite her apparent apathy.

Very deliberately, the woman passed her documents to her uniformed comrade, sitting behind the desk in the small office. "You're a little late to cover the navy's celebrations."

"Oh, I mostly do human interest stuff. Personal histories, that kind of thing."

"That's nice," she muttered ambivalently as she checked around her motorcycle and luggage. The other woman stamped her passport and travel permit at her desk before handing it back to the lieutenant after she finished, who neatly placed the permit inside the passport book and held it at Yuffie. "You may want to register with the W.R.O. consulate, the phone number and address for the Junon City office is on the paper with your permit. Currency exchange is…"

"Don't need it, I only have gil," she promised, referring to the prewar Midgar's currency Shinra had taken over.

"Right," she said, as Yuffie took the documents back. "Enjoy your visit to the New State of Junon, Ms. Kisaragi."

"How long have you been working here? I mean, in customs and immigration."

The woman glanced over at the other officer briefly, who shrugged. "I've been with the Border and Customs Service for almost two years."

"So you were here during Deepground?" The lieutenant's look of mild amusement hardened at the word. "Never mind. Thanks."

Passing through the checkpoint, the road took her in only one direction: to the fishing village closest to the fortress itself, directly beneath the Junon Airport and descriptively called Under Junon. Traffic died down to almost nothing, and the military presence reverted to foot traffic among a hamlet of rectangular brick cottages with dark shingled roofs interspersed among the airport's support beams and power conduits. History lives in Junon, Victor Io told her. At least in places like Under Junon, time was frozen; the shattered cobblestone road leading up to a freight elevator in the side of the fortress had been paved over, but broken concrete steps still led down to the beach and smaller docks, the preserved skeleton of a massive fish at least decades caught still hanging from a hook on macabre display. The air smelled strongly of diesel, though it was nowhere nearly as aggravating as the Kalmish smog, and the dully-dressed locals and the military presence skipped on masks. A small detail of Peace Preservation troops were loitering in front of the Under Junon Inn, laughing at one another—all women, Yuffie noted. Considering how empty the village was, as usual, even on foot military presence seemed a little disproportionate. _Man, I hope they don't know about the inspectors. _

She brought her motorcycle to a halt underneath a raised cottage next to one of the massive steel support pylons, the kind that had served as a model for the ones in Midgar, and killed the engine. The town felt eerily familiar; though she'd been to Junon on W.R.O. business before, she hadn't been to Under Junon since before Meteorfall, and everything was too recognizable for her comfort. The lights in the raised home weren't lit like its neighbors, and after frowning for a moment, she reached for a drably-dressed local as he passed by.

"Hey, is Priscilla still in town? I'm an old friend."

"Yuffie Kisaragi? Yuffie, what are you doing here?"

Yuffie glanced down the paved street. The detail of soldiers had begun to split up, and the smallest among them, clearly still a teenager, pulled off her helmet to reveal a somewhat swarthy girl with hair cropped short in the front, leaving just a few messy dark strands for her bangs, and a ponytail short enough to fit under a Shinra-manufactured helmet. Yuffie gaped at her.

In a small but smart-fitting blue Peace Preservation uniform, Priscilla Mahadevan hurried along the street to her, helmet under one arm, noisy boots on her feet. Instinctively, Yuffie noted she wasn't armed, though she did have a standard rifle bayonet sheathed on her belt. Then she kept staring at her, mouth agape.

Priscilla didn't seem to notice her expression, or didn't comment on it. "Yuffie, what're you doing here? Did you just get into town?"

She finally found her words. "…when did you join Junon Army?" she blurted out finally, looking to her left and right. The rest of the detail were still lingering outside the inn, and an officer in a dark red uniform with a kepi cap climbed up the stairs from the beach followed by a sailor in a startling white-and-blue uniform, while a few more military traffic cops stood by the freight elevator. Except for the sailor, all were female. "Did you get drafted? When did Junon start drafting little girls?" she demanded.

Priscilla's violet eyes widened before she sighed. "No, they don't draft little…I signed up a few months ago, after my birthday."

"Aren't you _sixteen_?" she asked, her body language emphasis how aghast she was.

"How would were you when you joined up with AVAL…you know who!" she countered. Priscilla visibly did the math in her head. "Aren't you, like, nineteen now?"

"This isn't about me," Yuffie snapped back authoritatively. "Priscilla, you hated Shinra! And you hated Junon, for that matter!" she growled in a hush voice.

Priscilla rolled her eyes the way a teenager might at a meddlesome adult. "Come on, Yuffie Kisaragi _of Wutai_, let's get you inside already."

* * *

_**Author's Notes:**_

_Another quickly-produced chapter using existing parts (and cutting a few out): we come to Junon, quite obviously one of my favorite locations in the whole game, and deliberate how one goes to Junon, which like most rural geography in the game is a pain in the ass. The 2015 remake trailers (which I didn't really pay much attention to, as I kind of lost interest in a FFVII re-imaging at the end of the Playstation 3 era personally) did something notable: an elevated highway in one of Midgar's sector actually states "Junon x miles", which, aside from the bizarre occurence of Midgar using imperial rather than metric units of measurement, basically stated that, by roadway, the city of Junon was approximately two hundred kilometers away (a few hours drive depending on speed, obviously) from urban Midgar. Even at the most contracted distances, one has to imagine this is alluding to a Midgar-Junon highway that Cloud and company, being a bunch of eco-terrorists traveling on foot, do not use (then again they were following "Sephiroth", actually Jenova, who wasn't either apparently, and Kalm is in the opposite direction._

_If you're sad that Yuffie didn't stop at Edge, or for that matter the ruins of Midgar, on the way, without spoiling anything, don't be too sad. As for Priscilla (no surname given in the original game, and presumably not 'Priscilla Dolphin'), including her came to me somewhat late in the writing...so it's either a stroke of genius or a waste of time. Let me know in a review! _


End file.
